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Gartner: Sky is the limit for cloud services
IT News |
23/06/2010
IT professionals can expect more of their duties to be focused on cloud-based technology management over the next five years, if latest Gartner forecasts are to be believed.
The analyst firm predicts the cloud services revenue will reach £46.4 billion this year, up by 16.6 per cent on 2009's market total of £39.2 billion.
According to Gartner, industry spending on managed IT services will have more than doubled to £99.7 billion by 2014.
Researchers expect businesses to invest £75 billion of this total on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, suggesting that many IT recruitment opportunities may exist with third party hosting providers.
Companies outside of North America will lead the charge, Gartner says, meaning the United States' 60 per cent market share will be diluted to 50 per cent by 2014.
And while Western Europe as a whole currently generates just 23.8 per cent of service revenues, the UK alone is expected to account for 29 per cent of the market within five years.
"We are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises, and an explosion of supply-side activity as technology providers manoeuvre to exploit the growing commercial opportunity," said Ben Pring, research vice-president at Gartner.
He claimed that after "many years of germination", most notably in the SaaS arena, the core ideas at the heart of cloud computing such as pay-for-use, multi-tenancy and external services "appear to be resonating more strongly" among businesses.
Mr Pring noted that the global economic downturn had contributed to this trend, with companies scrutinising capital expenditure more thoroughly than ever and choosing to invest in IT services rather than infrastructure.
"An IT solution that can deliver functionality less expensively and with more agility - remembering that time is money - is hard to ignore against this backdrop," he commented.
Gartner's forecast comes just a week after the firm reported that SaaS technology is failing to live up to its early potential.
The firm claimed that some of the bad practices affecting the on-premise IT industry are now making their way into the on-demand sphere, increasing total cost of ownership.
In the report, chief information officers were urged to develop policy and governance documents, evaluate SaaS vendors more closely, and create a road map for SaaS and on-premise integration.
Posted by Stephen Wilkinson
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