Industry-specific clouds are those PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS services that are tailored for a specific vertical, such as transportation, retail, finance, and healthcare. IDC sees a $65 billion market in these industry solutions for 2013, rising to $100 billion in 2016.
The value of industry-specific clouds is that businesses within a vertical can connect to applications, processes, and databases that are pre-defined for that vertical within a public or private cloud. They can extend processes and databases into the business domain, versus defining the data and processes within a generic cloud-based platform.