Cloud Forecast 2009-2013: Huge Growth in Revenue
IDC has come out with its cloud industry forecast for 2009-2013. The basic message, over five major enterprise IT segments (Application Software, Application Development and Deployment Software, Systems Infrastructure Software, and Server and Disk Storage capacity) the five-year revenue growth outlook remains strong, at 26% – over six times the rate of traditional IT.
When I read this, I thought, ‘This outlook turns the recession on its head’ because, as IDC says: ” In spite of the challenging economy – or more accurately, because of it – this growth rate advantage expanded from last year’s forecast, in which cloud services were forecast to grow at over five times traditional offerings.”
So how do the individual IT segments stack up in IDC’s forecast:
App delivery and development, servers and storage are seen to benefit the most from growth. In 2009, App delivery holds 10% of the market, while in 2013 it’ll grow to 13%. Meanwhile, storage will grow from the current 9% to 14%, while servers will grow from 12% to 15%. Applications, meanwhile, will drop from 49% this year to 38% in 2013. While Infrastructure software will remain the same – at 20% of the pie.
Yet, despite the spectacular growth rate predicted, cloud will only be a fraction of overall (cloud and on-premise) IT spend, says IDC. Cloud spend is only 5% of the total this year, destined to double to only 10% of overall IT spend.
Clearly, despite the hype, cloud versus on-premise spend is still miniscule. But, spending is forecast to grow at double-digit number, and in this rough economy, that’s damn good news. Yes? My prediction, if I may be so humble to put forth one, is that the more spend that’s invested in cloud development, the more attraction it’ll generate – like bees to honey.