In case there was any doubt about the cloud revolution, public cloud is now generating well over $20 billion in quarterly revenues for IT companies, according to new Q2 data from Synergy (News - Alert) Research Group.
The research firm said that $10 billion of that goes to companies supplying public cloud operators with hardware, software and data center facilities, and $12 billion is being generated from selling IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (News - Alert) to enterprise customers. In addition, the public cloud is helping to support huge revenue streams from a variety of Internet services such as search, social networking, email and ecommerce platforms.
Industry-specific applications will be a driving force as businesses look for solutions that can be easily configured to their unique business and vertical requirements. With the huge increase in the number and diversity of services available in the market, organizations across the industries will shift steadily toward cloud-first strategies to enable digital transformation.
Web-scale networking continues to characterize the landscape, but a few key players dominate the market. On the supply side, the companies with the biggest share of revenues are Cisco (News - Alert), HP, Dell, IBM and Equinix. On the cloud services side the market leaders are AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, Google and IBM.
“While there is still a place for small-medium sized public cloud players, especially on the service side within a specific region, the public cloud really is dominated by hyperscale cloud operators that can afford to build huge data center footprints that span multiple continents,” added John Dinsdale, a chief analyst and research director at the firm.
In terms of the total IT market, hardware and software used to build public clouds now account for 24 percent of all data center infrastructure spend, while public cloud operators and associated digital content companies account for 47 percent of the data center colocation market. While the total IT market grows at less than five percent per year, IaaS/PaaS revenues have grown by 49 percent over the past year and SaaS has grown by 29 percent.
“Public cloud is now a market that is characterized by big numbers, high growth rates and a relatively small number of global IT players,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder and chief analyst.