$110 Billion Cloud Market Growing 28% Annually: Synergy Research

Datamation content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

New data released today from the technology analysts at Synergy Research Group contains positive news for cloud providers and the vendors that outfit their data centers.

“Across a range of cloud market segments, 2015 growth rates averaged 28 percent and annual revenues passed the $110 billion milestone,” John Dinsdale, Synergy Research Group chief analyst, told Datamation. The firm drew its conclusions from the four quarters ending Sept. 30, 2015.

“Among the segments, public IaaS/PaaS [infrastructure-as-a-service/platform as a service] saw the highest growth rates, but cloud infrastructure hardware and software still generate the most revenues at the moment,” continued Dinsdale. Combined, the public IaaS and PaaS market segments, led by Amazon and Microsoft, grew at a blistering rate of 51 percent.

The private and hybrid cloud infrastructure services segment wasn’t too far behind, with a growth rate of 45 percent. IBM and Amazon were the top performers in the category. In total, all segments grew at a rate of at least 16 percent, observed Synergy.

In the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment, Salesforce and Microsoft are battling it out for dominance. Computer networking giant Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are the vendors to beat in the public and private cloud infrastructure hardware and software segments.

cloud computing growth

Cisco was also named a leader in the unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) category, alongside Citrix. According to another report released yesterday by Synergy, the UCaaS market is growing 16 percent annually, with annualized revenues now totaling $4 billion.

Cisco, Citrix and Microsoft are the top three providers of standalone UCaaS applications, a category that includes cloud-delivered videoconferencing, Web conferencing and hosted contact center software. In integrated UCaaS business suites, a segment that is growing at 23 percent annually, RingCentral, 8×8 and Vonage take the lead.

During the four quarters tracked by Synergy, cloud services infrastructure hardware and software spending surpassed $60 billion, driven by private cloud spending although the public cloud is catching up quickly.

Cloud services providers generated $20 billion from infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, private and hybrid cloud services), during the 12-month survey of the market. SaaS accounted for $27 billion in cloud spending.

In the face of such lofty figures, the message to the IT industry is clear, according to Dinsdale. “Cloud has now passed way beyond the early adopter phase and is truly a mainstream phenomenon,” he said. “High growth rates will persist for many more years.”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.