Forrester hoists cloudy growth forecast by a fifth
19 per cent of hardware will be bound for cloud datacentres by 2020, analyst says
Forrester has hoisted its growth forecasts for the public cloud market by a fifth and now expects the global market to be worth close to $200bn (£119bn) by 2020.
According to the analyst, public cloud revenue will reach $72bn this year before growing to $191bn by the beginning of the next decade.
This is 20 per cent up on the $160bn figure Forrester estimated the market would reach in 2020 when it published its last cloud market sizing model in 2011.
The new model takes advantage of five years of actual vendor data, it explained.
The report also predicted that by 2020, 19 per cent of the $230m spent on server and storage hardware will be for cloud datacentres. In 2013, cloud datacentres accounted for just three per cent of hardware spend of $142m.
"Cloud will not take over the technology market but will become an increasingly large part of that market, especially as a complement to on-premises core transactional systems," the report stated.
Cloud or SaaS applications currently account for four fifths of the market and will grow from $52bn in 2013 to $133bn by 2020, Forrester said. That's a compound annual growth rate of 14 per cent.
The real lightning growth, however, will come from public cloud platforms, a category that combines IaaS and PaaS that Forrester says shifted into "hypergrowth mode" in 2012.
Public cloud platforms from the likes of AWS and Google will generate $44bn in revenue by 2020, Forrester predicted, compared with just $4.7bn last year, a compound annual growth rate of 38 per cent.
Forrester's third category – public cloud business services (middleware) – will grow from $4.7bn to $14bn in 2020, it predicted.
Report author James Staten said growth in public cloud is being driven by CIOs shifting their exploration of cloud as a potential option, to rationalisation of cloud services within the overall IT portfolio.
"The CIO's biggest battle will be the internal cultural, psychological and financial accounting barriers born in a different age that will take decades to change," Staten said.