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IDC says global public cloud revenues hit $63 billion with PaaS quickest growing segment

Revenues from the global public cloud services market stand at $63.2 billion (£48.2bn) with the market growing 28.6% year over year in the first half of 2017, according to IDC.

The largest segment, by some distance, remains software as a service (SaaS), totalling $43.4bn comprising 68.7% of the market share. This is down from the first half of 2016, where SaaS saw 71.8% market share, yet the segment still grew 22.9% year over year.

The fastest growing segment, whilst remaining the smallest, was platform as a service (PaaS), growing 50.2% year over year and hitting $8.6bn, at 13.6% of overall market share. IDC attributes the continued rise down to the ‘rapid’ adoption of container technology, giving developers additional tools to accelerate application development and deployment.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) comprised 17.8% of market share in 1H17 totalling $11.2bn in revenues and at a yearly growth of 38.1%.

In terms of regional growth areas, Asia Pacific saw the highest regional growth in the most recent figures at 38.9%, according to IDC, with a major contributing factor being strong public cloud spending in China, which was at 55.6% year over year growth.

“Businesses now think ‘cloud first’ when it comes to their IT strategy and software footprint, since the benefits of cloud are clear and have been broadly demonstrated in most industries,” said Eric Newmark, program vice president for IDC’s SaaS, enterprise applications and industry cloud research practices. “Many companies have picked the low-hanging fruit, in terms of apps that could be easily moved to the cloud, and are now evaluating the migration of their next set of larger strategic systems to a SaaS model.

“These projects, coupled with companies’ efforts to embrace digital transformation, will continue to fuel strong SaaS growth.”

As this publication reported earlier this week, IDC recently published its Worldwide CIO Agenda 2018 predictions, which offer the 10 most important shifts taking place in IT organisations over the next three years. Among the more interesting predictions include the forecast that the majority of CIOs who ‘cross the digital divide’ by 2020 will reap the rewards of their efforts to become digital business leaders for their enterprises.