Forrester takes tape measure to cloud market

Report represents the first serious attempt to size the cloud market over the next decade, claims analyst

Forrester has predicted a six-fold boom in cloud computing sales by 2020 in what it claims is the first serious attempt to measure the market over the next 10 years.

The analyst expects the global cloud computing market to grow rapidly from $40.7bn (£24.7bn) in 2011 to $241bn in 2020, with SaaS set to provide a sustained growth sweet spot.

Its Sizing The Cloud report examines the three core layers of cloud - public, virtual private and private - to reveal the current and future size of 12 cloud segments over the next decade.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) represents the largest and most sustainable growth opportunity, according to Forrester.

In contrast, the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market will peak at $5.9bn in 2014 before shrinking, as commoditisation and price deterioration kick in.

Dynamic infrastructure services, which Forrester sees as the virtual private cloud counterpart of IaaS, are set to outperform IaaS in the public cloud in the long run.

Report co-author Stefan Ried said in a blog: "Each year, it gets harder to make clear-cut distinctions, based on technology, between what is a cloud and what is simply a virtualised datacentre or a traditional hosting provider.

"Therefore, Forrester decided to focus instead on the major disruption in the IT industry that cloud computing is bringing about: disruption based not on technology but on the business model under which IT operates."