Cloud Studies Point to Market Growth, Challenges, Players

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

Fifty percent of enterprises will have hybrid clouds by 2017, according to the Global Hybrid Cloud Services Market 2016-2020 study by Technavio.

Costs, migration and monitoring in the past were much greater challenges for those businesses that considered and/or employed cloud services, but now hybrid cloud services enable small and medium enterprises to put most of their services on the cloud and still maintain some key legacy applications, the study notes.

“The hybrid cloud helps the companies as well as start-ups to use the best practices from traditional on-premise[s] IT infrastructure inclusive of governance, management, and standardization regardless of location,” according to the study. “It also provides an extended platform combining public and private clouds with dedicated servers to deliver seamless performance in a customized manner.” 

The study talks about the exponential growth of cloud-based services, saying that the increasing uptake of such services by mid-sized enterprises is a key driver contributing to this. However, the study suggests latency in data centers is a problem and will be a challenge for this product category.

Global Hybrid Cloud Services Market 2016-2020 also lists and discusses key solutions providers in the cloud and hybrid cloud space. According to the study, AWS, Microsoft, Rackspace (News - Alert) and VMware are key players in this arena. The study also talks about Avnet, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Cherwell Software (News - Alert), Cisco, Dimension Data, Hornbill Services, HP, IBM, LANDesk, Mulesoft, NTR Global (News - Alert), Oracle and Unisys.

According to a separate study, this one called Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide and published by International Data Corp., worldwide revenues from public cloud services are expected to reach more than $195 billion in 2020.

“Cloud software will significantly outpace traditional software product delivery over the next five years, growing nearly three times faster than the software market as a whole and becoming the significant growth driver to all functional software markets,” said Benjamin McGrath, senior research analyst for SaaS (News - Alert) and business models at IDC. “By 2020, about half of all new business software purchases will be of service-enabled software, and cloud software will constitute more than a quarter of all software sold.”

Spending on new cloud infrastructure services grew 52.3 percent between the second quarter of 2015 and the same quarter this year, when it hit $9.5 billion, according to yet another study, this one by research group Canalys.