The market analysts at IDC have come out with some new predictions for growth in the cloud computing industry. They believe public cloud spending will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent over the next four years to reach $108 billion in 2017. That’s five times faster than IT spending in general.
They expect software as a service (SaaS) to be the largest category of cloud spending, accounting for 59.7 percent of revenues in 2017. Platform as a service (PaaS) will come in second with 29.7 percent of cloud revenues.
“The first wave of cloud services adoption was focused on improving the efficiency of the IT department,” said IDC’s Frank Gens. “Over the next several years, the primary driver for cloud adoption will shift from economics to innovation as leading-edge companies invest in cloud services as the foundation for new competitive offerings. The emergence of cloud as the core for new ‘business-as-a-service’ offerings will accelerate cloud adoption and dramatically raise the cloud model’s strategic value beyond CIOs to CXOs of all types.”
