Research firm Gartner has released its annual Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012. The report examines expectations versus maturity in the cloud market and potential of each individual segment. The conclusion – enterprises need to focus less on the marketing, and more on the operational advantage that the cloud could potentially realize for their organization.

Gartner lists cloud-based email, sales force automation and virtualization as the 3 most mature technologies, in that order. These are followed by SaaS, enhanced network delivery and IaaS.

The report expects the hosted email solutions market to reach an annual growth rate of 10 percent by 2014, more than the 6 percent in 2011 but considerably less than the 29 percent previous Hype Cycles forecasted.  On the other side of the isle, cloud-based business process management – one of the most over-hyped verticals on Gartner’s chart – will grow 25 percent year over year.

A top spot has also been reserved for PaaS, which the research firm says is the area with the biggest gap between customers’ expectations and the actual benefits that can be realized.  On the other hand, SaaS is growing like crazy, and over 50 percent of enterprises will adopt it by 2015.

The private cloud in turn didn’t lose any of its momentum either, and 75 percent of the companies Gartner pulled said they plan to implement it in the next 2 years.

One of the big conclusions of this report is that infrastructure-as-a-service providers still have a long way to go. This is a gap that will be bridged sooner than later considering than AWS, the elephant in the room, is facing a need to beef up its pitch in light of growing competition from Google, Azure, and many smaller players.