I wanted to shares my cloud forecast and 2015 markets shares for EMEA with you. In 2015 the total grew by 37.0% in Euros (15.0% in $US) to reach €29.9B ($33.3B). The best performing subcategory was IaaS, which grew by 43.8% – followed by PaaS (41.4%): together these accounted for 6.1% of the total IT Service market in 2015. SaaS grew at 31.5% to reach €15.0B – taking 5.9% of the total Software market. This extraordinary growth (see Figure) will continue, with spending almost doubling to €54.4B in 2020.
The first and fastest investors in delivering cloud services have been a mixture of IT suppliers (IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) and gaming companies (Electronic Arts, Activsion, etc.). Market shares for the total, PaaS, IaaS and SaaS markets in EMEA in 2015 are shown in the Figure. IBM was the leader of the total cloud services and PaaS markets, Amazon was top of IaaS (where telecom suppliers France Telecom, BT and Deutsche Telekom also play), Microsoft was head of the SaaS market (ahead of the world-leader salesforce.com, which is quite US-centric for now). All suppliers are involved to some extent with the cloud – HP for instance in providing the computing elements for those running them and in supporting the EU’s Cloud 28+ initiative, or VMware in supplying the server, storage and networking virtualisation necessary for cloud computing: however including them in a broader ‘cloud’ category is problematic, because ‘cloud builder’ elements are sold to non-cloud customers. Let me know if you’d be interested in an assessment.
One day I believe every piece of software, hardware or IT service will be available as a cloud offering, but for now cloud services remain a small – if rapidly growing – part of the overall market. The Figure shows my forecast to 2020 of the proportion IaaS+PaaS services will be of the total IT Services, and SaaS of software markets. If I’m right but the end of the decade some 12% of software and 11% of IT services will be purchased as cloud services. Eventually (beyond 2020) we won’t need to differentiate by using the ‘cloud’ tag perhaps. Eventually for a supplier not to provide services through the cloud will be as exceptional as a bank deciding to ditch its computers today.
There are still a number of suppliers (Dell, HP for instance) who remain ‘cloud builders’, rather than cloud services suppliers. They may change their tune as the market grows and the likes of IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle reap the rewards of their early investments.