Gartner: Public Cloud Service Growth Outpacing Overall IT

A new survey from Gartner shows public cloud services will be a huge opportunity for cloud service providers, cloud aggregators and cloud brokers over the coming years. The opportunity will grow at an incredibly rapid pace to reach $207 billion by 2016 — far outpacing the meager growth of overall worldwide IT spending, which seems to have plateaued and will only see single-digit growth annually over the next few years.

According to Gartner’s latest quarterly IT spending report, the worldwide market for public cloud services topped $91 billion in 2011 and is expected to be valued at $109 billion in 2012, with more than 100 percent growth expected to a projected $207 billion in 2016. And chances are, the channel will be able to take advantage of a considerable amount of that business, especially considering how certain public cloud services providers such as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) have done an about-face on how they position their services with the channel, making it more a viable option and reducing the vendor/partner conflict that has plagued public cloud services since they first started emerging.

“Business process as a service (BPaaS) still accounts for the vast majority of cloud spending by enterprises, but other areas such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are growing faster,” said Richard Gordon, Gartner’s research vice president, in a prepared statement.

Gordon described overall IT spending growth as “lackluster,” with only a 3 percent year-over-year growth from 2011 to 2012 expected. Granted, that represents a difference of $3.5 trillion to $3.6 trillion over an annual period, which is a considerable amount of money up for grabs, but in terms of growth, the IT sector has seen better days.

Public cloud services is one of the few areas expected to grow far beyond the overall IT market’s growth rate. In terms of services, specifically, Gartner predicts spending to reach $864 billion in 2012. Cloud makes up only a portion of that service spending, but with the continued acceptance of public cloud infrastructure and services as a viable way to conduct business, it’s likely the percentage of services in general that are cloud-based will increase over the next few years.