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Analyst house Gartner has looked into its crystal ball again, and predicts the worldwide public cloud services market will reach $204 billion (£142.8bn) in value by the end of this year.

The majority of the revenue will come through cloud advertising at $90.3bn in 2016 growing at 13.6%. Business process as a service (BPaaS), which Gartner defines broadly as “the delivery of business process outsourcing services that are sourced from the cloud and constructed for multi-tenancy”, will total $42.6bn this year, but with the slowest growth rate of 8.7%.

Software as a service will remain the largest of the primary markets at $37.7bn in 2016 and growing at 20.3% year on year, but infrastructure as a service will constitute the fastest growing segment, at 38.4% and $22.4bn. Cloud application infrastructure services – in other words, PaaS – will have a healthy growth of 21.1% but contribute only $4.6bn to the total.

“IaaS continues to be the strongest growing segment as enterprises move away from data centre build-outs and move their infrastructure needs to the public cloud,” said Gartner research director Sid Nag. “Certain market leaders have built a significant lead in this segment, so providers should focus on creating differentiation for success,” he added.

No prizes for guessing who those players are. According to figures from Synergy Research back in July, the revenues of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google, and IBM in infrastructure services comprise more than half of the global market. As a more recent note explained: “While there is still a place for small to medium sized public cloud players, the public cloud really is dominated by hyperscale cloud operators that can afford to build huge data centre footprints that span multiple continents.”

The same note found the public cloud continues to make significant inroads into the overall IT market, generating more than $20bn per quarter for IT firms.