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Operator and vendor revenues across the main cloud services and infrastructure market segments hit $148 billion (£120.5bn) in 2016 growing at 25% annually, according to the latest note from analyst firm Synergy Research.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) experienced the highest growth rates at 53%, followed by hosted private cloud infrastructure services, at 35%, and enterprise SaaS, at 34%. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft lead the way in IaaS and PaaS, with IBM and Rackspace on top for hosted private cloud.

In the four quarters ending September (Q3) 2016, total spend on hardware and software to build cloud infrastructure exceeded $65bn, according to the researchers. Spend on private cloud accounts for more than half of the overall total, but public cloud spend is growing much more rapidly. The note also argues unified comms as a service (UCaaS) is growing ‘steadily’.

“We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and I’d say that 2016 is the year that cloud started to dominate many IT market segments,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group founder and chief analyst in a statement. “Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, especially on the public cloud side.

“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for technology vendors and cloud service providers and yet there are still many years of strong growth ahead,” Duke added.

The most recent examination of the cloud infrastructure market by Synergy back in August argued AWS, Microsoft, IBM and Google continue to grow more quickly than their smaller competitors and, between them, own more than half of the global cloud infrastructure service market.