Enterprise spending on public cloud infrastructure and services is set to hit $266 billion by 2021, according to new research from International Data Corp.

The analyst firm said public cloud services spending will also grow 25.4 percent this year alone, to $128 billion. About two-thirds of enterprises’ public cloud spend will go to software-as-a-service, or applications hosted in the cloud, IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Spending Guide indicated.

Customer relationship management and enterprise resource management are the next biggest segments in the market, though spending on infrastructure as a service, the base-level computing and storage services, and platform as a service, for application development and hosting, will grow faster than any other over the forecast period.

Breaking things down further, the biggest spending region will be the U.S., which is forecast to splash out $163 billion on public cloud services through 2021, accounting for some 60 percent of worldwide cloud revenues.

However, Western Europe will see much faster growth in terms of its public cloud spending. “In Western Europe, the public cloud market is going to more than double in the 2016-2021 timeframe led by strong spending growth in Germany, Italy and Sweden,” said Angela Vacca, IDC’s senior research manager for customer insights and analysis.

As for industries, IDC says that the banking, discrete manufacturing and professional services sectors will spend the most on public cloud. Media, retail and telecommunications will see the fastest growth through 2021, however.

“Much of the public cloud services growth in these industries is coming from new projects and initiatives from functional areas like customer service and sales,” said Eileen Smith, program director for customer insights and analysis at IDC.

IDC said more than half of all spending will come from businesses with more than 1,000 employees, with medium-sized companies accounting for approximately 20 percent. Purchasing priorities will vary depending on company size, though IDC expects CRM and ERM applications, servers and storage space to be the leading public cloud products.

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