Awesome Cloud Services had some rather surprising research results concerning the cloud. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is on a tear, expected to grow 41.7 percent from 2011 to 2016. Meanwhile Software as a Service (SaaS), which one would presume to be in high demand, is growing at a decent but comparatively meager 17.4 percent through 2016.
That sounds a bit odd as SaaS is far easier to implement than IaaS, which is pure infrastructure upon which you must place your computing tasks. SaaS, on the other hand, is pretty much ready to roll, unless it is a complicated application like ERP or CRM. Awesome is in the business of providing hosted IT infrastructure through channel partners, so it is no surprise that its research focused quite a bit on IaaS.
Virtualization is the essential basis of cloud service, and there is good news to report on that front, as by next year some 60 percent of all server loads will be virtualized.
Cloud Computing Infographic
Another interesting finding is that the US almost dominates the cloud market, representing half of all worldwide cloud revenue. As far as apps go, CRM is plenty hot with 40 percent of CRM instances now in the cloud.
The overall cloud market is on a pretty steep trajectory. “The market size of Enterprise Cloud Based Services will increase from $18.3 billion in 2012 to $31.9 billion in 2017; the SaaS Applications and Services market will rise from $27 billion in 2012 to $67 billion in 2016; and the Public Cloud Storage market will increase from a 2012 figure of $5.6 billion to $12.2 billion in 2016,” Awesome argued.
AWS Leads the Charge
Just this week Google unleashed its Compute Engine to go after Amazon, but that is a tough challenge indeed. For partners, ISVs and service providers, AWS is one hot market. In Gartner’s latest ‘Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service’, AWS far outstripped all its rivals. “AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers in this Magic Quadrant. It is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices. It has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes its service one of the few suitable for batch computing, especially for workloads that require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time,” the research house said.
The public cloud is the largest sector, and here IDC finds that public cloud IT services, a $47.4 billion market today, will be a $107 billion market by 2017. Meanwhile at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent, the cloud is growing five times faster than the overall IT industry. And overall public cloud services are also on the move, growing 18.5 percent at the market moves from $111 billion last year to $131 billion this year. There are three applications that CompTIA sees as leading the cloud charge. “As cloud components are becoming more prevalent in IT architectures, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes such as storage (59 percent), business continuity/disaster recovery (48 percent), and security (44 percent),” the non-profit channel advocacy organization found.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
