Trying to assess the size of any or all of the cloud computing market is like tacking Jello to the wall so thank God someone –Gartner — attempts it.
In a new report, the big researcher estimates that the public cloud market overall will grow 18.5 percent to $ 131 billion in 2017 from $ 111 billion in 2012, according to a new report.. Under this broad umbrella term for public cloud services, Gartner includes the usual suspects — infrastructure as a service a la Amazon and the growing crowd of OpenStack-based public cloud providers as well as cloud storage and print services.
The public cloud IaaS and file and storage represents fastest growing part of public cloud services, growing 42.4 percent in 2012 alone to $ 6.1 billion and with growth accelerating to 47.3 percent growth expected to bring it to $ 9 billion in 2013. Gartner research director Ed Anderson said that’s happening as more companies go beyond the usual development and test scenarios to more for-real production deployments — a topic we’ll doubtless touch on at GigaOM’s Structure: Data event in New York March 20-21.
Gartner also includes “cloud-based advertising services” as another hot sub-category. I assume this includes such offerings as,Akamai’s new ad integration service plus perhaps SaaS based ad and marketing tools a la Salesforce.com. I’ve asked Gartner for some clarification on this so stay tuned.
Update: Gartner defines Cloud advertising as “processes that support the selection, transaction, and delivery of advertising and ad-related data where content and price are determined at the time of end-user access, usually by an auction mechanism that matches bidders with impressions as they become available.” Relevant vendors include AOL, Apple AppNexus; Baidu; Facebook, Google; Microsoft; OpenX; and Yahoo.
The report also shows geographic differences in cloud deployment persisting: According to Anderson’s statement:
“Although forecast growth is generally high across all regions, the adoption of cloud services varies significantly by country. Providers should not assume that a generic strategy applied to specific countries or regions of the world will produce the same outcome when applied to other countries, even countries with similar market characteristics … Local economic factors, regulatory issues, the local political climate, the diverse landscape of global and local providers, including noncloud providers, and other country-specific factors ensure a unique marketplace in each country and region.”
North America will the most enthusiastic adopter of public cloud services with Gartner expecting it to account for 59 percent of all new spending in the overall category from now till 2016, with Western Europe remaining number 2, despite local challenges with 24 percent of all spending. But, as expected, the highest growth rates will be seen in emerging markets in Asia (especially in Indonesia and India), China and Latin America.
So now comes the hard part: Remembering to come back and re-check this prediction in three or four years.
This story was updated at 5:05 a.m. PDT to include Gartner’s definition of cloud-based advertising services.
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