Public cloud services could be worth $302 BEEELLION by 2021

Public cloud services will be a $302bn-plus global market by 2021 and ten vendors will account for nearly three-quarters of those sales, if the mystics at Gartner have read those tea leaves correctly.

All segments are set to expand but the fast growing area is slated to be infrastructure services, jumping 36 per cent between last year and this to $40.8bn and rising to $83.5bn by the end of the forecast period: AWS, Microsoft and Google already account for the lion's share of sales here.

“The increasing dominance of the hyper scale IaaS providers creates both enormous opportunities and challenges for end user and other market participants,” said Sid Nag, research director.

“While it enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organisations need to be cautious about about IaaS providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market,” he added.

Despite so much power being held by a relatively low number of vendors, business users will “demand a simpler way to move workloads, applications and data across cloud providers’ IaaS offering without penalties”, the Gartner man said.

Sales of software-as-a-service are predicted to rise 22.2 per cent from 2017 to hit $73.6bn in 2018, and is projected to account for 45 per cent of total application software spending by 2021 when it is forecast to hit $117.1bn.

Database-platform-as-a-service is forecast to reach nearly $10bn by 2021, the most rapidly growing area of PaaS, where Oracle and Microsoft are vying for customer share and where AWS is coming on stronger. The wider PaaS sector is expected to hit $15bn this year and $27.3bn by 2021.

Cloud Business Process Services (CBPS) and Cloud Management and Security Services (CMSS) will be $46.4bn and $10.5bn areas by the close of 2018, Gartner claimed.

And if the equations, formulae and other methods to make estimations are right, CBPS and CMSS will be worth $58.4bn and $16.1bn respectively by 2021. ®