SaaS and IaaS markets drive $180bn cloud market

The success of IaaS and SaaS services has helped to drive annual cloud market revenues to $180 billion, according to figures from Synergy Research Group.

According to the new data, six key cloud services and market segments helped to boost operator and vendor revenues for the four quarters ending in September 2017 to $180 billion, which reportedly exceeds revenues for both the cloud hardware and cloud software markets.

In fact, statistics show that the total spend on cloud hardware and software for infrastructure building during this period totalled $80 billion, which was split almost evenly between private and public spending. Meanwhile, spending on enterprise SaaS and cloud infrastructure services including IaaS and PaaS exceeded $100 billion.

The figures also revealed that IaaS and PaaS services saw the fastest growth rate in terms of revenue at 47 per cent, while SaaS saw its revenue increase by 31 per cent and hosted private cloud infrastructure services achieved a growth rate of 30 per cent.

Commenting on the results of the analysis, John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, suggested that much of the success of these services is down to cloud computing becoming more mainstream.

"We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and 2016 as the year when cloud started to dominate many IT market segments. In 2017 cloud was the new normal," he said. "Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, with previously perceived weaknesses such as security now often seen as strengths."

"Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for cloud service providers and technology vendors and we forecast that current market growth rates will decline only slowly over the next five years."

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