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Public Cloud Services Expenditures To Reach Nearly $109 Billion This Year

Organizations will spend nearly $109 billion worldwide this year on public cloud services, an increase of 19.6 percent over last year, according to a report from information technology research and advisory company Gartner.

The report, Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 2Q12 Update, forecasts spending on public cloud services through 2016 and breaks down the industry into five segments: business process as a service (BPaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and cloud management and security services. Cloud advertising is a subsegment of BPaaS.

More than three-quarters of public cloud services expenditures go toward BPaaS. In 2011, organizations spent $72 billion on BPaaS, and Gartner said it expects that amount to grow to $84.2 billion for 2012, with cloud advertising representing about 47 percent of public cloud services spending on its own, a number that Gartner anticipated will remain relatively constant through 2016.

Organizations will spend $14.4 billion on SaaS this year, making it the second-largest public cloud services segment. However, organizations are spending an increasing amount of money on IaaS, making it the fastest-growing segment, and Gartner anticipated spending on IaaS nearly to equal spending on SaaS by 2016. Organizations spent $4.3 billion on IaaS in 2011, and Gartner said that number to grow to $6.2 billion for 2012.

In the remaining segments, Gartner forecast that organizations will spend $1.2 billion on PaaS in 2012 and $3.3 billion on cloud management and security services.

Organizations spent $91.4 billion worldwide on public cloud services in 2011, and that number will grow to $206.6 billion in 2016, according to Gartner.

The full report is available through the Gartner site.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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