Software gets largest share as global public cloud revenue to grow 21.4% in 2018

Global Public Cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4 percent in 2018 to total $186.4 billion, an increase from $153.5 billion in 2017, according to Gartner, Inc., a market research firm.

The American research and advisory firm providing information technology-related insight for IT and other business leaders located across the world said in its forecast released Thursday that the fastestgrowing segment of the market is Cloud system infrastructure services or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). which is expected to grow 35.9 percent in 2018 to reach $40.8 billion.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said in a statement that “the increasing dominance of the hyperscale IaaS providers creates both enormous opportunities and challenges for end users and other market participants.”

The research firm expects the top 10 providers to account for nearly 70 percent of the IaaS market by 2021, up from 50 percent in 2016.

“In response to multicloud adoption trends, organisations will increasingly demand a simpler way to move workloads, applications, and data across cloud providers’ IaaS offerings without penalties,” Nag added.

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the Cloud market, with revenue expected to grow 22.2 percent to reach $73.6 billion in 2018. SaaS is expected to reach 45 percent of total application software spending by 2021. Within the platform as a service (PaaS) category, the fastest-growing segment is database platform as a service (dbPaaS) is expected to reach almost $10 billion by 2021.