UPDATED 21:34 EDT / NOVEMBER 06 2017

CLOUD

Cloud services are still notching solid growth this year

Public cloud services continue to grow at an extremely rapid rate, according to research firm International Data Corp.’s latest figures, with adoption rising in all three categories: software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.

IDC said that the overall public cloud services market has grown by almost 29 percent in the last year, pulling in $63.2 billion in total revenues. However, that growth was split unevenly, with the largest market segment, SaaS, which is online applications such as those from Salesforce.com Inc. and Workday Inc., trailing behind PaaS, which includes databases and application development and IaaS, which includes base-level computing, storage and networking services.

That’s not to say the SaaS market isn’t healthy. Quite the opposite in fact, with IDC saying that thousands of SaaS applications now exist, offered by a breadth of companies including both startups and Internet giants such as Google LLC and Microsoft Corp. The segment is still growing nicely, at a rate of almost 23 percent in the last year, and holds a 69 percent overall share of the public cloud market.

“Many companies have picked the low-hanging fruit, in terms of apps that could be easily moved to the cloud, and are now evaluating the migration of their next set of larger strategic systems (i.e. ERP, supply chain applications, etc.) to a SaaS model,” said IDC analyst and SaaS program Vice President Eric Newmark. “These projects, coupled with companies’ efforts to embrace digital transformation, will continue to fuel strong SaaS growth.”

Rising much faster, however, is the PaaS segment, with 50 percent growth year-over-year. This extremely rapid growth is being driven by the adoption of application container technology in the enterprise, but the segment remains the smallest overall with less than a 14 percent market share.

“All vendors are modifying their solutions to bring automation into the entire application lifecycle, and developers are rewarding such vendors with higher than average gains,” said Larry Carvalho, research manager for PaaS at IDC.

dn-zvn5wkaa9k8o

The IaaS segment – which is Amazon Web Services Inc.’s particular niche – displayed 38 percent growth, giving it a nearly 18 percent overall share of the cloud services market. IDC said IaaS is benefiting from the “overall granularity” of available offerings and a rise in the number of “value-added services” that companies such as AWS and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure are offering.

“Recent introductions into the market, like Azure Stack and VMware Cloud on AWS, also enable easier hybrid IT models and reduce the barrier to cloud adoption for enterprises,” said Deepak Mohan, research director for IaaS at IDC. “Cumulatively, these are paving the way for the next wave of enterprise application deployments on public cloud IaaS.”

Image: George Thomas/Flickr

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU