Cloud spending will reach $122.5 billion in 2017 and $203.4 billion in 2020, according to a recent update to International Data Corporation’s “Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide.”
The study also found that the predicted compound annual growth rate for cloud will be seven times that of overall IT spending growth from 2015 to 2020.
“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,” said Eileen Smith, program director for Customer Insights and Analysis at IDC. “Combined, these three industries will account for one-third of worldwide public cloud services spending, or $41.2 billion.”
The guide also predicts that Software-as-a-Service will be the dominant type of cloud computing through 2020, and that the United States will have the largest market for public cloud, accounting for about 60 percent of worldwide revenues.
Businesses of 1,000 employees or more will account for nearly half of public cloud spending, while large businesses of 500 to 999 employees will experience the fastest growth, according to the guide.
“As cloud adoption expands over the next four years, what clouds are and what they can do will evolve dramatically–in several important ways,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “The cloud will become more distributed (through Internet of Things edge services and multicloud 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.”
