According to a new report from research firm IDC Corp., worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will be more than $40 billion in 2012 and will approach $100 billion in 2016. Over the five-year forecast period, public IT cloud services will enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 26.4 per cent, outpacing the overall IT industry by five times as companies shift their IT consumption to a cloud services model.
“The IT industry is in the midst of an important transformative period as companies invest in the technologies that will drive growth and innovation over the next two to three decades,” said Frank Gens, senior vice-president and chief analyst at IDC, in a statement. “By the end of the decade, IDC expects at least 80 per cent of the industry’s growth, and enterprises’ highest-value leverage of IT, will be driven by cloud services and the other 3rd Platform technologies.”
According to IDC, by 2016, public IT cloud services will account for 16 per cent of IT revenue in five key technology categories: applications, system infrastructure software, platform as a service (PaaS), servers, and basic storage. And cloud services will generate 41 per cent of all growth in these categories by 2016.