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Cancel your cloud panic: At $122bn it's just 5% of all IT spend

*aaS-es are, however, fattening faster than any other segment of the market

For all the hype about cloud it's a bit of a revenue wimp: the abacus-shufflers of IDC have just told the world that it will account for about five per cent of the world's tech spend in 2017.

The firm's new Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide says “worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure will reach $122.5 billion in 2017.”

Contrast that to the firm's prediction from two weeks back that total IT spend in 2017 will hit US$2.4 trillion and we can see cloud is about five per cent of the pie.

IDC's counting the three biggest *aaS-es – Software, Infrastructure and Platform - in its new numbers and says SaaS will account for 60 per cent of cloud spend this year. IaaS and PaaS are tipped to grow more quickly in the coming five years, at compound annual growth of 30.1 per cent and 32.2 per cent respectively. That will produce total annual cloud spend of $203.4bn by 2020, still well behind overall spend but, critically, growing far faster than the rest of the market.

Beyond the *aaS market, we've covered predictions of public cloud hardware spend hitting about $e5bn a year in 2017, an impressive sum but one that hardly makes a dent in cloud's overall share of spend.

Again, however, cloud hardware spend – for on-premises private clouds or public clouds – is growing while on-premises hardware spend is sinking by about three points a year. ®

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