Public cloud spending: Trillion-dollar mark to fall before the end of the decade
According to the latest Gartner forecast, companies worldwide will book cloud services worth 675 billion dollars this year.
(Image: iX)
The demand for public cloud services continues to grow. According to a Gartner forecast, companies are expected to spend around 675 billion US dollars on them worldwide this year. This will exceed the 2023 volume by 20.4% and the pace of growth will increase by a further three percentage points compared to the previous year. Market researchers are forecasting even stronger growth of 22.1% for 2025.
A slump in growth is not in sight. According to forecasts, the booking volume is set to exceed the one trillion dollar mark before the end of this decade – with growth rates of around 20 percent, this will already be the case in 2026. In addition to application modernization, the driving force behind cloud growth is first and foremost the hype surrounding GenAI. According to Gartner, the latter is currently the most frequently used AI technology in companies.
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IaaS is benefiting particularly strongly
All sub-segments of the cloud market are growing this year. However, the first beneficiaries of the GenAI boom are the providers of Infrastructure-as-a-Service: the hunger for resources for model training, inferencing and predictive computing as well as model fine-tuning is immense. As a result, companies are expected to spend a good 25 percent on IaaS in 2024 (180 billion dollars) and over thirty percent in 2025 (232 billion dollars). Business with platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – also referred to by Gartner as cloud application infrastructure services - is expected to grow slightly faster than average, at 20.6% to 172.5 billion dollars and 22.7% to 211.6 billion dollars respectively. In contrast, the submarkets for business process services and desktop services will only grow slightly.
| Prognose: Weltweite Public-Cloud-Ausgaben, in Millionen US-Dollar | ||||||
| 2023 Spending | 2023 Growth (%) | 2024 Spending | 2024Â Growth (%) | 2025 Spending | 2025Â Growth (%) | |
| Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS) | 142.934 | 19,5 | 172.449 | 20,6 | 211.589 | 22,7 |
| Cloud Application Services (SaaS) | 205.998 | 18,1 | 247.203 | 20 | 295.083 | 19,4 |
| Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS) | 66.162 | 7,5 | 72.675 | 9,8 | 82.262 | 13,2 |
| Cloud Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) | 2708 | 11.4 | 3062 | 13,1 | 3437 | 12,3 |
| Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) | 143.302 | 19,1 | 180.044 | 25,6 | 232.391 | 29,1 |
| Total Market | 561.104 | 17,3 | 675.433 | 20,4 | 824.763 | 22,1 |
| Quelle: Gartner, 05/2024 | ||||||
However, user companies will continue to spend the most money on SaaS. In addition to the introduction of new, dedicated application services for AI and ML, IoT or big data on their own initiative, they are being pushed towards the cloud: The product policy of software suppliers is pushing the SaaS-based usage model. According to market researchers, the volume of cloud application services is set to increase by 20% this year to a good 247 billion dollars and by 19.4% next year to 295 billion dollars.
Further details on the forecast can be found at Gartner.
(mki)
