Public Cloud Market Hits All-Time High in 2019, Now a $233.4 Billion Industry: IDC

Abhisheik Shandilya

5 months ago

Public Cloud market faces its own challenges amid the ongoing pandemic, just like any other business. As the world struggles to cope with COVID-19, and businesses all over face difficulties, the latest findings by IDC (International Data Corporation) do have a silver lining for the public Cloud industry.

The Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker by IDC states that global public cloud market witnessed a year-on-year growth of 26 percent to hit the value of $233.4 billion. The data from IDC also includes Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

The IDC data also puts forth the fact that the market has doubled in size when compared to 2016. The data points toward consolidation in the market as the top five Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) together accounted for more than one-third of the global public cloud market. The top five CSPs — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce.com, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle — also registered a whopping 35 percent of year-on-year growth.

Rick Villars, group vice president of Worldwide Research at IDC stated, “Cloud is expanding far beyond niche e-commerce and online ad-sponsored searches. It underpins all the digital activities that individuals and enterprises depend upon as we navigate and move beyond the pandemic. Enterprises talked about cloud journeys of up to ten years. Now they are looking to complete the shift in less than half that time.”

The doubling of public Cloud market also brings data for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS models. The expenditure on IaaS and PaaS has tripled since 2016. Talking of SaaS, Frank Della Rossa, the research director at IDC for SaaS and Cloud Software stated, “SaaS applications remains the largest segment of public cloud spending with revenues of more than $122 billion in 2019. Although growth has slowed somewhat in recent years, the current crisis serves as an accelerator for SaaS adoption across primary and functional markets to address the exponential growth of remote workers.”

IDC also stated that it expects IaaS and PaaS to grow at a higher rate than the Cloud market in the coming years as ” resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.” However, as is clear from the data above, SaaS still dominates when it comes to market share. Nonetheless, IaaS and PaaS clearly have a significant lead when it comes to year-on-year growth, corroborating IDC’s predictions.

Lastly, the tracker states that AWS and Microsoft have claimed more than half of global revenue when it comes to IaaS and PaaS. Whereas, in the SaaS sector, the aforementioned top 5 only account for one-fourth of the market share. Salesforce.com still remains the leader when it comes to SaaS with a market share of 7.8 percent, closely followed by Microsoft at 7.4 percent.

IDC’s findings should not come as a surprise as businesses all over the world are rapidly embracing Cloud technology. This trend is only bound to increase with the world entering a new phase due to COVID-19. Deepak Mohan, the IDC research director of Cloud infrastructure services, very appropriately puts it as, “the COVID-19 disruption has accelerated cloud adoption with both traditional enterprise IT organizations and digital service providers increasing use of IaaS for their technology platforms.”