The adoption of ‘cloud first’ strategies by both IT vendors expanding their offerings and IT consumers deploying new solutions is fuelling the global public IT cloud services spending, which is expected to reach $127bn in 2018, rising from $56.6bn this year, according to IDC.
The latest research report noted that the industry will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.8%, which is about six times the growth rate for the overall IT market.
IDC senior vice president and chief analyst Frank Gens said: "Over the next four to five years, IDC expects the community of developers to triple and to create a ten-fold increase in the number of new cloud-based solutions.
"Many of these solutions will become more strategic than traditional IT has ever been.
"At the same time, there will be unprecedented competition and consolidation among the leading cloud providers.
"This combination of explosive innovation and intense competition will make the next several years a pivotal period for current and aspiring IT market leaders."
During the forecast period, public IT cloud services would make up more than half of the global software, server, and storage spending growth, the report adds.
Further, the cloud services market is now reportedly making its entry into an ‘innovation stage’ that will generate an outburst of new solutions and value creation over the cloud.
Software as a service (SaaS) is set to maintain its dominance among public IT cloud services spending, constituting 70% of cloud services expenditures this year, which will be followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
In addition, platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud storage services will be the best ever growing categories, which are fuelled by major rise in developer cloud services acceptance and big data-driven solutions, respectively.
