Across four key cloud service and infrastructure market segments, operator and vendor revenues for the first half of 2020 reached US$187 billion and it is likely annual spending on cloud services could double by 2024.
“Cloud-associated markets are growing at rates ranging from 10% per year to well over 40% and we forecast that annual spending on cloud services will double in under four years,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, which published the figures.
Reinforcing his point, cloud provider spending on colocation, leasing and data centre construction grew by 10% and enterprise SaaS revenues grew by 21%, while spending on hardware and software for public, private and hybrid infrastructure grew by 10%.
Elsewhere, the first half saw total spend on hardware and software used to build cloud infrastructure exceed $60 billion with a near even split between public and private clouds.
“In case anyone was still in doubt, cloud is increasingly dominating the IT landscape. Cloud technologies and services continue to disrupt the market and to open up new opportunities for operators, technology vendors and corporate end users. Amazon and Microsoft may be the poster children for this movement, but many others are benefitting too and most have seen relatively few negative impacts from the pandemic.”
In recent weeks, Alibaba unveiled new products at cloud computing conference; Google cloud picked up several new clients, including Orange, Verizon and Synechron, and PLDT extended its zero trust security platform in the cloud with NetFoundry.
According to the research, the strongest performance was recorded in cloud infrastructure services, comprising IaaS, PaaS and hosted private cloud services. First half revenue from these grew by 34% on 2019 levels.
Infrastructure investments by cloud service providers helped them to generate almost $120 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services and enterprise SaaS. In addition to these enterprise services, their cloud infrastructure also supports internet services such as search, social networking, email, e-commerce, gaming and mobile apps.
Synergy’s Q2 figures, released last week, showed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alibaba were leading the Asia-Pacific cloud market, where the pace of growth is higher than both North America and EMEA.
