By 2018, spending on public IT cloud services is set to be worth $127 billion.
That’s according to research from IDC, which indicates a five year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 22.8 percent – six times the rate for the IT market overall.
The spending is a result of the conjunction of IT vendors offering more services and buyers wanting to buy more kit.
IDC thinks much of the growth is likely to be industry platforms with their own communities.
The news is good for developers, as their numbers will triple and create as many as a 10 time increase of new cloud offerings.
And the offerings will be strategic rather than tactical.
IDC expects a great deal of consolidation in the cloud services industry as a result of increased competition.
Software as a service (SaaS) will dominate public IT cloud services spending – accounting for as much as 70 percent of expenditure this year. That’s because customer demand is chiefly at the application level, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
