Cloud now 'dominating' as major barriers subside - analyst

Synergy Research claims revenues across six key cloud segments grew by 25 per cent in the 12 months to September 2016

2016 was the year cloud began to "dominate", with major barriers to adoption now a thing of the past, according to one analyst which puts market growth last year at a quarter.

Operator and vendor revenues across six key cloud services and infrastructure market segments for the 12 months to September 2016 hit $148bn, up 25 per cent year on year, according to Synergy Research.

IaaS and PaaS, a sub-segment of the market led by AWS and Microsoft, led the way with 53 per cent growth.

Enterprise SaaS grew 34 per cent, while private cloud infrastructure - whose key protagonists include IBM and Rackspace - leapt by 35 per cent.

"We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and I'd say that 2016 is the year that cloud started to dominate many IT market segments," said Synergy Research Group's founder and chief analyst Jeremy Duke.

"Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, especially on the public cloud side. Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for technology vendors and cloud service providers and yet there are still many years of strong growth ahead."

Synergy also said 2016 will go down as the year in which spend on cloud services zoomed past spend on cloud infrastructure hardware and software, adding that cloud services are now growing at treble the rate of the latter.

Total spend on hardware and software to build cloud infrastructure topped $65bn in the 12-month period, with spend on private cloud accounting for half of that, the analyst added.