Sales of cloud services will exceed $100bn globally this year after a 19% increase over the past 12 months.
According to Gartner, sales of business processes as a service (BPaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which includes services such as email, account for over three-quarters (77%) of the market. These areas represent the fastest growing part of the cloud services market, with a 45% increase in sales in 2012.
The BPaaS segment will be worth $84.2bn in sales in 2012, compared with $72bn in 2011. The second biggest in terms of sales was Software as a Service (SaaS), worth $14.4bn. and IaaS grew from $4.3bn in 2011 to $6.2bn this year.
"The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT market," said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. "The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and then prioritising investments in line with the opportunities."
Platform as a Service (PaaS) will be worth $1.2bn in 2012, and cloud management and security services will reach $3.3bn in sales.
Anderson said the total public cloud services market size will grow to $206.6bn by 2016, with the market share of IaaS and cloud management and security services growing.
