Gartner on Sunday predicted that the MENA public cloud services market will generate $462.3 million in revenue during 2013, marking a 24.5 percent increase from 2012.
Gartner said that this market is forecast to show 13.4 percent growth for 2012, totalling $371.2 million, compared to $110 billion worldwide.
Business process services (BPaaS) is the largest segment in the cloud services market, accounting for around 38 percent of the total MENA market in 2012, Gartner said. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), meanwhile, will continue as high-growth sectors of the cloud service market through to 2016, as will cloud management and security services.
Indeed, Gartner expects some of the highest regional growth to be exhibited in the SaaS segment, where cloud-based office suites and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions will, Gartner said, grow rapidly.
Growth in SaaS, which is projected to reach $211 million by 2016, will be supported by strong growth in cloud application infrastructure services, or PaaS. Overall, the PaaS marketplace will exceed $46 million by 2016, the research firm added.
However, cloud advertising will continue as the single largest source of spending within the cloud services marketplace, Gartner said. According to its report, this market will grow from $56.6 billion in 2012 to $192 billion in 2016. This will be fed by the strong performance of cloud advertising giant Google, and real-time mobile ad exchange newcomers, such as Mobix.
“Cloud services spending continues to outpace other parts of the IT marketplace,” said Ed Anderson, Research Director, Gartner. “Worldwide, spending on cloud services will grow 17.7 percent through 2016. In the Middle East and North Africa region, growth is expected to be even higher – around 20.2 percent.
“Although there are some variations between cloud services segments, overall, the outlook is very positive.”
