The International Data Corporation recently released its report which predicts IT cloud services’ revenues to reach $43.2 billion in the United States of America by 2016. The amount is comparatively large, up by 18.5% from its 2011 amount of $18.5 billion. The public IT cloud offerings include services for both corporate and personal consumption.
In this report, the IDC also split the US market into 5 technology and 6 vertical categories. Technology categories include storage-as-a-service, server-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, and application-as-a-service while the vertical categories include home consumer/business, public sector, infrastructure services, service industry and distribution services, resources and manufacturing, and financial services market.
Also, the International Date Corporation says that construction, education, and communications form part of the burgeoning vertical markets. In its 2011 revenue figures, distribution and services contribute 30.3% to the total sales while infrastructure is touted to contribute 13% to the 2016 spending. For media and communications, IDC predicts that this sector will maximize their use of storage services due to the relevance of content offerings to their customers.
The IDC report is a supplement to the recently released predictions for 2016 by IT research firm Gartner. According to Gartner, the worldwide market for cloud computing can be worth $206.6 billion in 2016. The report also supports the findings of VMware that adoption for infrastructure-as-a-service will be accelerated.
It also affirms the solution providers’ belief that the cloud computing market will respond to niche industries. However, the IDC report also offers an analysis of vertical industries. According to IDC program manager Eileen Smith, process manufacturing, professional services and discrete manufacturing are considered less antagonistic to risks as well as more open to shifting their operations to the clouds. As such, cloud solution providers can create cloud packages which target these industries which, in turn, will open the gates for new cloud computing providers who want to provide other packages aside from Google Apps.