Public cloud market surged to $126bn in Q1 - research

The market analyst’s figures broke down global IaaS and PaaS services spend

The main public cloud service and infrastructure markets, operator and vendor revenues surged 26 per cent to total $126bn during the first quarter of 2022, according to new figures from Synergy Research Group.

The market analyst said the biggest growth was seen in IaaS and PaaS, with Q1 revenues jumping 36 per cent to reach more than $44bn.

In the other main service segments, managed private cloud services, enterprise SaaS and CDN added another $54bn in service revenues, having grown by an average 21 per cent from last year.

The Synergy Group's data also found that, in order to support both these and other digital services, public cloud providers splashed out $28bn on building, leasing and equipping their datacentre infrastructure, which was up 20 per cent from Q1 2021.

Across the whole public cloud ecosystem, companies that featured the most prominently were Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce and Google.

Other major players included Adobe, Alibaba, Cisco, Dell, Digital Realty, IBM, Inspur, Oracle, SAP and VMware.

In aggregate these companies accounted for 60 per cent of all public cloud-related revenues.

"Public cloud-related markets are typically growing at rates ranging from 15 per cent to 40 per cent per year, with PaaS and IaaS leading the charge. Looking out over the next five years the growth rates will inevitably tail off as these markets become ever-more massive, but we are still forecasting annual growth rates that are generally in the ten per cent to 30 per cent range," said Synergy Group chief analyst, John Dinsdale.

"To enable cloud service markets to keep up with demand by doubling in size in the next 3-4 years, the major cloud providers need an ever larger footprint of hyperscale datacentres and more raw computing power, which then drives the markets for datacentre hardware and software.

"For sure the competition will be tough, but up and down the cloud ecosystem there will be a bright future for companies that bring the right products to market in a timely fashion."

The market analyst firm added that,while cloud markets are growing strongly in all regions of the world, the US remains a centre of gravity.

In Q1 it accounted for 44 per cent of all cloud service revenues and 51 per cent of hyperscale datacentre capacity.