Global Cloud services market to surpass $68billion in 2010

The market analyst believes the industry is poised for strong growth through 2014, when it projects worldwide cloud services revenue to reach $148.8bn. North America accounted for 60% of Cloud services revenue in 2009. "We are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises and an explosion of supply side activity as technology providers manoeuvre to exploit the growing commercial opportunity," said Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner. "The scale of application deployments is growing; multi-thousand-seat deals are increasingly common. IT managers are thinking strategically about cloud service deployments; more-progressive enterprises are thinking through what their IT operations will look like in a world of increasing cloud service leverage. This was highly unusual a year ago." Gartner estimates that, over the course of the next five years, enterprises will spend $112bn cumulatively on software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), combined. "After many years of germination, most notably in the SaaS arena, the core ideas at the heart of cloud computing — such as pay for use, multi-tenancy and external services — appear to be resonating more strongly," Mr. Pring said. "In part, this can be explained by macroeconomic factors. The financial turbulence of the last 18 months has meant every organisation has been scrutinising every expenditure. An IT solution that can deliver functionality less expensively and with more agility (remembering that time is money) is hard to ignore against this backdrop."