Public cloud revenues soar by 28% in 2017

The global public cloud market saw revenues swell by 28.6 per cent in the first half of 2017, according to the latest data from researcher IDC, as the sector continues to grow.

According to the firm’s Worldwide Semi-annual Public Cloud Services Tracker, total sales in the industry hit $63.3 billion (£44.2 billion), a figure which represents a large advance on 2016’s $49.2 billion.

According to Frank Gens, IDC’s chief analyst and senior vice-president, the figure shows that companies are moving to public cloud services as a matter of urgency.

Gens added: “Public cloud adoption is accelerating in large part as enterprises recognise that the cloud has become the launchpad for virtually every new IT innovation in the past 24 months – including AI, blockchain, quantum computing and more. Organisations not on the public cloud will be increasingly isolated from the world of tech innovation.”

Though software as a service (SaaS) retained the biggest share of the market, with $43.4 billion worth of revue, as a proportion of the whole industry it fell from 71.8 per cent to 68.7 per cent.

Meanwhile IaaS products earned $11.2 billion for the industry, and PaaS sales brought in $8.6 billion.
In the UK alone, total revenue in the sector was up 12.8 per cent, reaching $2.9 billion in the first six months of 2017. Of these sales, 70 per cent were down to SaaS products.

Eric Newmark, IDC’s programme vice-president for SaaS and industry cloud research, said a “cloud first” mentality among businesses meant many were considering migrating systems to a SaaS infrastructure.

He continued: “Many companies have picked the low-hanging fruit, in terms of apps that could be easily moved to the cloud, and are now evaluating the migration of their next set of larger strategic systems such as ERP, supply chain applications, and so on, to a SaaS model.”