IDC and Gartner squabble over cloud market size

Public cloud market will be worth $40bn or $109bn this year, depending on which analyst you listen to

The amorphous nature of public cloud has led Gartner and IDC to knock heads over the market's size.

Just a week after IDC forecast that spending on public IT cloud services will reach $40bn (£24.6bn) in 2012, Gartner begged to differ, predicting that the market will top a cool $109bn in 2012.

Despite the dramatic difference – which may be down to a lack of clarity over the market's parameters – both analysts forecast juicy growth for public cloud, with Gartner pegging it at $206.6bn and IDC at "approaching" $100bn in 2016.

According to Gartner, 77 per cent of the public cloud market is accounted for by business process as a service (BPaaS), with the majority of that stemiming from cloud advertising. In contrast, SaaS and IaaS accounted for just $14.4bn and $6.2bn of the total $109bn figure respectively.

This may explain the contrast with IDC, which defines public cloud as "those offerings designed for, and commercially offered to, a largely unrestricted marketplace of potential users".

Gartner further predicted that western Europe will experience the slowest growth in the coming years, with the ongoing eurozone crisis blamed.

Veeam Software's president Ratmir Timashev said that regardless of the predictions, the market still offers a lot for the channel.

"From our side, we do not see the evolution of the cloud slowing down any time soon and expect this management and security growth to continue over the next several years," he added.

"As the cloud grows to a mammoth scale, cloud management and security services will naturally grow to match."