Key findings in a new Gartner report showed that cloud computing is likely to grow 16.5% in 2016, reaching $204 billion in spending. According to Sid Nag, director, cloud technologies at Gartner Research, “The market for public cloud services is continuing to demonstrate high rates of growth across all markets and Gartner expects this to continue through 2017. This strong growth continues to reflect a shift away from legacy IT services to cloud-based services, due to an increased trend of organizations pursuing a digital business strategy.”
Research firm IDC also sees the cloud market increasing at a rapid pace, although their numbers are slightly different from Gartner’s. IDC expects spending to grow from last year’s $70 billion to more than $141 billion in 2019. In a press release, Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, commented, “This means that many enterprise software customers, as they reach their next major software upgrade decisions, will be offered SaaS as the preferred option. Put together, new solutions born on the cloud and traditional solutions migrating to the cloud will steadily pull more customers and their data to the cloud.”
In regards to applications tailored for individual verticals, IDC’s Eileen Smith, who is program director of customer insights and analysis, said the following: “Industry-specific applications will be a driving force as businesses look for solutions that can be easily configured to their unique business and vertical requirements. With the huge increase in the number and diversity of services available in the market, organizations across the industries will shift steadily toward cloud-first strategies to enable digital transformation.”
Within Perficient’s life sciences group, we absolutely see the same growth trend as Gartner and IDC. In fact, the majority of the system implementations and upgrades we perform for our biopharmaceutical and CRO clients today are deployed into our regulatory-compliant clinical cloud.
