Credit: Japan National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST)
Infrastructure services are spearheading a soaring cloud ecosystem market as global revenue for the first half of 2021 hit US$235 billion.
Cloud infrastructure services accounted for US$150 billion – or 63 per cent – of this total figure, according to new research by analysis firm Synergy Research Group. These included infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), hosted private cloud services and enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS).
First-half revenue from these services grew by 37 per cent from 2020, Synergy claimed, with enterprise SaaS revenues growing by a quarter.
Meanwhile, spending on IT hardware and software for public, private and hybrid infrastructure grew by 16 per cent. The final component, colocation, leasing and data centre construction, grew by 17 per cent, the analyst firm stated.
“Those cloud providers need somewhere to house their infrastructure, so their substantial spending on data centre leasing, colocation services and data centre construction also continued to grow,” Synergy Research Group added.
Across the whole cloud ecosystem, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Dell, Google and IBM dominated the global market. At the same time, the likes of Cisco, Adobe, Oracle, VMware, SAP, HPE, Alibaba, Inspur and Huawei accounted for well over half of all cloud-related revenues in aggregate.
In the first half of 2021, the total spend on hardware and software used to build cloud infrastructure was over US$70 billion, with public cloud spending now being substantially bigger than private cloud.
“Cloud-associated markets are growing at rates ranging from 15 per cent to over 40 per cent per year and our forecasts show that annual spending on cloud services will double in under four years,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.
“Cloud is increasingly dominating the IT landscape, benefitting companies throughout the cloud ecosystem. While a rising tide lifts all boats, the companies doing particularly well are those which don’t have boat anchors of large, legacy non-cloud markets.”
According to Dinsdale, companies like Amazon, Salesforce and Google were hardly present in enterprise IT a decade ago, but are now a “major force in the market”. In addition, Microsoft, already an enterprise favourite, has “transformed itself into being the leading cloud player, based on revenues from the whole ecosystem”.
