Global public cloud market hit $312bn last year according to IDC
AWS and Microsoft locked horns for the top spot
The global public cloud services market grew 24.1 per cent year on year in 2020, with revenues clocking in at $312bn (€256.9bn), according to IDC.
The findings include Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), System Infrastructure Software as a Service (SISaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
The analyst claims spending continued to consolidate last year with the combined revenue of the top five public cloud service providers (AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) capturing 38 per cent of the worldwide total and growing 32 per cent YoY.
Owing to an expanding portfolio of SaaS and SISaaS offerings, Microsoft shares the top position with AWS in the whole public cloud services market, with the giants holding 12.8 per cent revenue share for the year.
"SaaS applications is the largest and most mature segment of public cloud with 2020 revenues of $148bn," said IDC research director, SaaS and Cloud Software, Frank Della Rosa.
"Organisations across industries hastened the replacement of legacy business applications with a new breed of SaaS applications that is data-driven, intuitive, composable, and ideally suited for more distributed cloud architectures.
"Organisations looking for industry-specific applications can choose from a growing assortment of vertical applications. The SaaS apps market is dominated by a longtail of providers that account for 65% of the total market."
IaaS and PaaS solutions in demand
IaaS earned $67.2bn (€55.3bn) revenue in 2020, a rise of 33.9 per cent, while PaaS jumped 31.8 per cent to $47.6bn (€39.2bn).
IDC added that, while the overall market showed strong growth last year, consistent with the past four years, the IaaS and PaaS segments have consistently grown at much faster rates.
The market watcher expects spending on foundational cloud services (especially IaaS and PaaS) to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market as resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.
"The high pace of growth in PaaS, IaaS, and SISaaS, which combined account for about half of the public cloud services market, reflects the demand for solutions that accelerate and automate the development and delivery of modern applications" said IDC research director, Platform as a Service, Lara Greden.
"As organisations adopt DevOps approaches and align according to value streams, we are seeing PaaS, IaaS, and SISaaS solutions become increasingly adopted and, at the same time, grow in the range of services and thus value they provide. Innovations in edge and IoT use cases are also contributing to the faster rates of growth in these markets."