Worldwide cloud services market is expected to grow 19.6% in 2012 to exceed $109bn, according to a new report from Gartner.
The report revealed that business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BpaaS) will account for about 77% of the total market, while infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is expected to grow 45.4% in 2012.
BPaaS is anticipated to grow to $84.2bn in 2012, up from $72bn in 2011.
Gartner research director Ed Anderson said the cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace.
"The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and then prioritizing investments in line with the opportunities," Anderson said.
Last year, cloud advertising represented about 47% of the total public cloud services market and through 2016, it will continue to account for about 47% of total public cloud services spending.
Software as a service (SaaS) is expected to grow to $14.4bn this year, while IaaS is projected to grow to $6.2bn from $4.3bn in 2011.
The IaaS market, which was less than one-third the size of the SaaS market in 2010, is expected to grow to almost equal the size of the SaaS market by 2016.
Application infrastructure services (also known as platform as a service, or PaaS) is projected to grow to $1.2bn in 2012 while the cloud management and security services segment is forecast to grow to $3.3bn.
Gartner expects the highest regional growth rates will be in Asia/Pacific including India and Indonesia, greater China, Eurasia including Russia and Latin America including Argentina, Mexico and Brazil.
The report revealed that Western Europe is expected to grow the slowest during the forecast period, largely due to ongoing eurozone economic issues, while growth will also be lower in mature Asia/Pacific markets due to ongoing economic challenges in the Japanese market.
North America will account for 61% of all growth from 2010 through 2016 while Western Europe will account for 17% of absolute cloud services growth over the same period.
According to the report, high growth rates will occur in emerging markets, including India, Indonesia and China while 79% of spending increases will come from North America and Western Europe.
"The total public cloud services market size in 2011 was $91.4 billion, and it will grow to $206.6 billion in 2016,"Anderson added.
"As the market grows, IaaS will become a larger part of the overall market, while the market share of cloud management and security services will grow as well."
