Enterprise cloud services to grow US$31.9 billion by 2017

The worldwide market for enterprise cloud-based services will grow from US$18.3 billion in 2012 to $31.9 billion in 2017.

That is according to research group Analysys Mason, who says the year-on-year growth rate will be 17% in 2013, but will decrease during the next five years as the size of the cloud services market increases overall.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) accounted for 66% of revenue in 2012, while 33% was related to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

This revenue split will change during the next five years according to Mason, who believes the share of revenue from IaaS will increase to 43% by 2017.

Providing a five-year forecast of cloud services revenue worldwide, the report is split into four enterprise size segments, four channels to market, eight geographical regions and 12 countries.

"While the enterprise public cloud services market continues to grow, it is at a slower overall rate than in our previous forecast, particularly in developed countries," says Steve Hilton, principal analyst, Analysys Mason.

"We define ‘public cloud services’ as the provision of applications or infrastructure in a hosted, multi-tenancy model, where pricing is generally structured as a recurring charge.

"This slowing of growth is the result of difficult economic conditions worldwide and slower-than-anticipated adoption of new IT technology by both large and small enterprises."

Developed countries:

In developed countries, Hilton believes revenue from enterprise cloud services will increase from $17.0 billion in 2012 to $28.7 billion in 2017, at a CAGR of 11%.

In emerging markets, revenue from such services will remain far smaller however, increasing from $1.2 billion in 2012 to $3.2 billion in 2017, at a CAGR of 20.9%.

The share of worldwide enterprise public cloud services revenue generated from emerging markets will be slightly above 10% by 2017 – up from 7% in 2012.

SMEs:

Enterprises between one and 249 employees accounted for 43% of total public cloud services revenue by the end of 2012 as SMEs often have fewer security-related concerns than large enterprises when adopting cloud services.

Yet they are slower overall to adopt new technology solutions with Hilton expecting the proportion of revenue from SMEs to increase to 49% by 2017, chiefly because:

"SMEs’ awareness of public cloud solutions will continue to increase the usability of SME cloud services will continue to increase as vendors and CSPs create affordable, easy-to-use solutions CSPs will continue to add solutions to their portfolios that are targeted towards SMEs," he says.