March is one of my favorite months. It’s a time of renewal, hope, and rejuvenation, with clocks being pushed forward an hour alongside the arrival of Spring. Being a sports fan, March is a great month for college basketball and March Madness, as well as the arrival of the professional baseball season.
Around this time, the writers at Forbes like to release their roundup of cloud computing forecasts and market estimates, collected from industry thought leaders, research firms, and cloud computing vendors. These statistics are important because they outline the direction that cloud computing is taking, and enable Perficient to communicate the best directions our customers should take to adapt to new technologies.
The latest numbers appear to corroborate the themes of March and communicate the upward trajectory of cloud computing as we head into the second quarter of 2016. Here are some examples:
- The worldwide cloud computing market grew 28% to $110 billion dollars in 2015 according to Synergy Research Group. Market growth was led by public infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) and platform as-a-service (PaaS) solutions.
- The global market for platform-as-a-service will reach $7.5 billion dollars by 2020, according to consultancy firm Global Industry Analysts.
- Research firm IDC predicts cloud information technology infrastructure spending to grow to 53.1% in 2019 and account for 46% of total expenditures on IT infrastructure spending. Additionally, the research firm also predicts external cloud computing will increase 22% in 2015 to 32.1% in 2017, or a growth rate of 45.8%. Finally, they also discovered that 70% of those surveyed indicated a heavy interest towards a hybrid cloud deployment.
From these numbers, it’s clear that interest in cloud is continuing to increase at a feverish pace as organizations discover how it can enable digital transformation and increase competitive potential. What stands out to me as I look at these numbers is the increasing interest in IaaS and PaaS solutions and the many opportunities that DevOps and engineering teams will have available when examining solutions on the market. With IBM recently being named a leader in the hybrid cloud space by research firm Gartner, IT organizations will have many solid choices to pick from.
Stay tuned as the market evolves!
