There’s a huge surge in public cloud services expected

The public cloud services market is forecast to grow by the end of this year.

That’s according to Gartner, which predicts this market will grow by 19.6 percent in 2012 to total $109 billion worldwide.

Business process services (BPaaS) was said to represent the largest segment, accounting for about 77 percent of the total market. Gartner said this was because of the  inclusion of cloud advertising as a subsegment.

In 2011, cloud advertising represented about 47 percent of the total public cloud services market, making it the biggest identifiable subsegment in the forecast. Through 2016, cloud advertising will continue to account for about 47 percent of total public cloud services spending.

As a result this segment is said to grow to $84.2 billion in 2012, up from $72 billion in 2011.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was predicted by the company to be the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market – expected to grow 45.4 percent in 2012. Gartner added that  this sector was forecast to grow from $4.3 billion in 2011 to $6.2 billion in 2012, beating the Software as a Service market (SaaS). It added that by 2016, the IaaS market would grow to almost equal the size of the SaaS market.

Gartner said this was a huge turnaround from 2010 when the IaaS market was less than one-third the size of the SaaS market.

Growth in application infrastructure services (also known as platform as a service, or PaaS) will also be high, although it is a smaller market relative to the other segments. PaaS is strategic and considered to be a critical growth driver for other segments, including BPaaS and SaaS.

The PaaS segmentwas  forecast to grow to $1.2 billion in 2012. Cloud management and security services constitute a new forecast segment comprising cloud security services, IT operations management (ITOM) and storage management (including backup and recovery services). The cloud management and security services segment is forecast to grow to $3.3 billion in 2012.

Gartner said the Western Europe region was forecast to grow the slowest during the forecast period, largely due to ongoing eurozone economic issues, and warned growth would also be lower in mature Asia/Pacific markets due to ongoing economic challenges in the Japanese market.

North America will account for the greatest percentage of absolute growth in the cloud services market, with 61 percent of all growth from 2010 through 2016.

Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner, said: “The total public cloud services market size in 2011 was $91.4 billion, and it will grow to $206.6 billion in 2016. 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.

“When targeting specific markets within the cloud services marketplace, we recommend evaluating both potential market size and growth rates. These will vary by segment, subsegment, region and country.”