The cloud services market will grow by nearly 20 percent worldwide and is estimated to touch nearly $109 billion by the end of 2012, according to the latest figures from analyst firm Gartner (News - Alert).

Despite major economic crisis in Europe – one of the big cloud consumer regions – and signs that Chinese economic edifice is shaky, spending on cloud services is staggering, the firm revealed.

Gartner’s "Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 2Q12 Update" report also predicts that cloud services market will rise to $206.6 billion by 2016, with both IaaS and cloud management/security services growing substantially.

While North America is still the largest region for cloud services, emerging markets like Asia Pacific, China and Latin America are expected to demonstrate the highest regional growth rate overall. North America is expected to produce around 61 percent of growth, while Europe will produce a growth rate of around 17 percent. 

Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) is currently the biggest growth area in the cloud services segment, accounting for 77 percent of the market. BPaaS for this year alone will be worth $84.2, increasing from $72 billion in 2011. In addition, cloud advertising which falls under BPaaS made up about 47 percent of the total public cloud services spend. Cloud advertising will continue to account for 47 percent of this spending between now and 2016.

Moreover, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is the fastest growing segment and is likely to continue so with an estimated growth figure of 45.2 percent in 2012 alone. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) is the next biggest segment after BPaaS. This cloud services sector is expected to grow to $ 4.4 billion by the end of the year, with IaaS expected to be worth $6.2 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2012.

“The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and then prioritizing investments in line with the opportunities,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner, in a statement.

Cloud management and security, which consists of cloud security services, IT operations management and storage management, is another critical area in cloud services. This market is expected to ramp up to nearly $3.3 billion by the end of the year and is also likely to experience considerable growth in the coming years.

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