Global Cloud Business Market Generated $34.4B in 2012

With Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) leading the cloud services market in total revenue, the global business cloud services market generated $34.4 billion in revenue in 2012 – up 28 percent over the prior year, according to new figures by Strategy Analytics.

SaaS captured more than half of all cloud services revenue – and nearly all the revenue from six of the seven members of the billionaire business cloud services revenue “club,” which includes Microsoft, Intuit, Amazon, Salesforce, Cisco and Oracle.

“SaaS has dominated the first surge in mass adoption of business cloud services,” Andrew Brown, executive director of enterprise research at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement. “We expect the next big surge to come from private and public IaaS offerings designed to suit European and Asia-Pacific business and government policies.”

Additionally, the public cloud services captured 83 percent of total cloud services revenue in 2012, according to Strategy Analytics’ “Global Business Cloud Services Revenue Market Shares, 2012, and Forecasts, 2010-2017,” which features top global business cloud service provider 2012 revenue and shares for overall cloud SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) markets.

The business cloud services market ranges from mature to immature market segments, explained Mark Levitt, director of business cloud strategies research at Strategy Analytics. 

“SaaS led by Salesforce.com has already achieved massive adoption and IaaS led by Amazon is attracting customers that are questioning whether owning and operating corporate data centers make sense in the age of the cloud,” Levitt said. “However, PaaS is still just emerging, as it attempts to use the successes of SaaS and IaaS to attract the attention of commercial and corporate software developers.”

The public cloud services market is forecast to grow 18.5 percent in 2013 to total $131 billion worldwide – up from $111 billion in 2012, according to Gartner, Inc. IaaS, including cloud compute, storage and print services, continued as the fastest-growing segment of the market, growing 42.4 percent in 2012 to $6.1 billion, and expected to grow 47.3 percent in 2013 to $9 billion.