In its latest forecast for the worldwide public cloud services market released Wednesday, Gartner Inc. said it expects revenue to keep shooting up, by 17.3 percent, to top $206 billion next year.

The analyst firm said infrastructure as a service, which includes the bulk of the public cloud services offered by companies such as Amazon Web Services Inc., will remain the fastest-growing individual segment in the market, growing by nearly 28 percent, to $39.5 billion, in the next year.

Moreover, Gartner said, it’s expecting that around 90 percent of organizations that purchase IaaS will do so from a company that integrates these offerings with platform-as-a-service products, using both capabilities from the same provider.

According to Gartner Research Director Sid Nag, this is thanks to a growing demand for integrated IaaS and PaaS that’s “driving the next wave of cloud infrastructure adoption.”

“We expect that IaaS-only cloud providers will continue to exist in the future, but only as niche players, as organizations will demand offerings with more breadth and depth for their hybrid environments,” Nag said. “Already, strategic initiatives such as digital transformation projects resulting in the adoption of multicloud and hybrid cloud fuel the growth of the IaaS market.”

Meanwhile, the software-as-a-service segment remains the largest overall, and revenue there is expected to grow by 17.8 percent, to $85.1 billion, by 2019.

“The increasing adoption of SaaS applications and other cloud services impacts the management, dissemination and exploitation of enterprise content,” said Craig Roth, a research vice president at Gartner. “Organizations are steadily, but not exclusively, shifting their content environments to SaaS.”

The second-largest segment in cloud, the business process-as-a-service category, will also see strong growth of 7.9 percent, reaching $50.3 billion in revenue by 2019. BPaaS essentially refers to outsourcing that employs a cloud computing service model, and includes human resource functions such as payroll and benefits administration, procurement, advertising, marketing and industry operation processes.

It should be noted, however, that BPaaS isn’t expected to stay in second place forever, as Gartner forecasts the IaaS segment to overtake it in terms of revenue by 2021.

The last segment, cloud management and security services, is also expected to continue growing and will see revenue of $12.5 billion in 2019, up from a forecast of $10.7 billion this year.

By 2021, Gartner expects overall cloud market revenues to hit $278 billion.

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