Global public cloud revenue will break $200bn barrier in 2019 - Gartner

Analyst predicts SaaS will remain the dominant segment in the market as it grows 17 per cent in 2019

The worldwide public cloud revenue market is forecast to grow 17 per cent to $206bn (£155bn) in 2019, according to Gartner.

This year is expected to see revenues in the market hit $176bn, an increase of 21 per cent from 2017.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the dominant segment in the public cloud market, with Gartner predicting revenues will grow 17.8 per cent to reach $85bn in 2019.

The analyst expects SaaS to maintain this market dominance over the next four years and generate global revenues of $113bn by 2022.

Craig Roth, research vice president at Gartner, said that the increasing adoption of SaaS applications and other cloud services affects the management, dissemination and exploitation of enterprise content.

"Organisations are steadily - but not exclusively - shifting their content environments to SaaS," he said.

"Gartner expects that by 2019, the current enterprise content management market will devolve into purpose-built, cloud-based content solutions and solution services applications."

Cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the market, predicted to reach $39.5bn next year, representing a 27.6 per cent increase from $31bn in 2018.

By 2022, Gartner expects that 90 per cent of organisations will buy their public cloud IaaS from an integrated IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said that this demand for IaaS and PaaS is the driver for the next wave of cloud infrastructure adoption.

"We expect that IaaS-only cloud providers will continue to exist in the future, but only as niche players, as organisations will demand offerings with more breadth and depth for their hybrid environments," he said.

"Already, strategic initiatives such as digital transformation projects resulting in the adoption of multicloud and hybrid cloud fuel the growth of the IaaS market."

Meanwhile, business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) is forecast to see a moderate eight per cent growth in 2019, generating revenues of $50bn.

Gartner found that this category in particular will see buyers increasingly expect deep domain expertise, technology and global deployment capabilities from their providers.

Customers also expect their providers to offer service portfolios that bridge legacy offerings and support new automated, digital and cloud service delivery paradigms, according to the analyst.

(Source: Gartner, September 2018)