News Feature | March 3, 2017

Cloud Spending Will Reach $203.4 Billion In 2020

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Data Governance, Security Concerns Drive Adoption Of Private Cloud Solutions

Global IT spending will reach $2.65 trillion by 2020, with SaaS ousted as the top cloud computing type.

Gartner and International Data Corporation (IDC) have issued a forecast  predicting public cloud spending will balloon to $203.4 billion by 2020 with global IT spending reaching $2.65 trillion in the same year. The report suggest Software as a Service (SaaS) will be ousted as the top cloud computing type, falling from representing nearly two-thirds of public cloud spending in 2017 to 60 percent by 2020, according to IDC.

IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees will comprise half of all public cloud spending in 2017 as the segment vastly outperforms other parts of the industry. “In 2017, discrete manufacturing, professional services, and banking will lead the pack in global spending on public cloud services as they look for greater scalability, higher performance, and faster access to new technologies,” says Eileen Smith, program director, Customer Insights and Analysis. “Combined, these three industries will account for one third of worldwide public cloud services spending, or $41.2 billion.”

While SaaS will continue to dominate, its share of the market will decline as spending on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) will grow at 30.1 percent and 32.2 percent respectively. “While purchase priorities vary somewhat depending on company size, the leading product categories include CRM and enterprise resource management applications in addition to server and storage hardware”, IDC officials say.

“As cloud adoption expands over the next four years, what clouds are and what they can do will evolve dramatically in several important ways,” says Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “The cloud will become more distributed (through Internet of Things edge services and multi-cloud services), more trusted, more intelligent, more industry and workload specialized, and more channel mediated. As the cloud evolves these important new capabilities — what IDC calls Cloud 2.0 — the use cases for the cloud will dramatically expand.”

The Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide quantifies public cloud computing purchases by cloud type for 20 industries and five company sizes across eight regions and 47 countries to help IT decision makers to clearly understand the industry-specific scope and direction of public cloud services spending today and over the next five years.