Worldwide cloud services revenue is forecast to reach $68.3bn in 2010, an increase of 16.6% compare to $58.6bn for the same period last year, according to a report from IT research and advisory firm Gartner.
Gartner said that the industry is poised for strong growth with global cloud services revenue projected to reach $148.8bn in 2014. The research firm expects that over the next five years enterprises will spend $112bn cumulatively on software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), combined.
Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner, said: "We are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises and an explosion of supply-side activity as technology providers maneuver to exploit the growing commercial opportunity."
According to Gartner, North American and European markets represent the largest markets from a geographic perspective, and other geographies even though they will experience growth, it will not alter the overall weighting away from the larger, more-mature regions over the course of the next five years.
Geographically, the US share of the worldwide cloud services market was 60% in 2009 and is expected to be 58% in 2010, but by 2014, this is expected to be reduced to 50% as other countries and regions begin to adopt cloud services in more-significant volumes.
Western Europe is expected to account for 23.8%, while Japan will represent 10% of the market in 2010. In 2014, the UK is forecast to account for 29% of the market, and Japan is expected to represent 12% of cloud services revenue.
In industry terms, the financial services and manufacturing industries are the largest early adopters of cloud services. Communications and high-tech industries are also leveraging the cloud in significant volume, while the public sector is also clearly interested in the potential of cloud services.
However, although the interest among cloud computing has grown, enterprises still have various concerns such as security, availability of service, vendor viability and maturity.
Mr Pring, added: "Many enterprises may be examining cloud computing and cloud services, but are far from convinced that it is appropriate for their requirements.
"We expect that this will be a significant opportunity for existing IT services players to evolve their current offerings – such as outsourcing, system integration, development, etc. – to become cloud-enabled and try to combine the best of the two worlds, namely traditional IT services and cloud computing."
