IDC: Public Cloud Market Will Hit $72.9 Billion in 2015

SOURCE:  IDC

Cloud computing will continue to reshape the IT landscape over the next five years as spending on public IT cloud services expands at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6%, from $21.5 billion in 2010 to $72.9 billion in 2015. But the impact of cloud services will extend well beyond IT spending, according to new research from International Data Corporation (IDC). Cloud services are a critical component in a much larger transformation that IDC expects will drive IT industry growth for the next 25 years.

“Cloud services are interconnected with and accelerated by other disruptive technologies, including mobile devices, wireless networks, big data analytics, and social networking,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC. “Together, these technologies are merging into the industry’s third major platform for long-term growth. As during the mainframe and PC eras, the new platform promises to radically expand the users and uses of information technology, leading to a wide and entirely new variety of intelligent industry solutions.”

As a critical component to the third platform, cloud services represent a strategic growth area for virtually all IT vendors. With spending for public IT cloud services growing at more than four times the rate of the worldwide IT market as whole, IDC expects one of every seven dollars spent on packaged software, servers, and storage offerings in 2015 will be related to the public cloud model. Moreover, the winners of the cloud platform wars will likely be the new power brokers of the IT industry.