IT Cloud Services Primary Sectors of Adoption

Theoretically, all types of organizations should be predisposed to consider the transition to managed cloud services -- due to the numerous anticipated benefits. However, based upon the results of recent market research in the United States, it now appears that some sectors are much more likely to be part of the growing early-adopter movement.

International Data Corporation (IDC) announced the findings of a new market study, which forecasts that from 2009 to 2014 the U.S. public IT cloud services revenue will grow 21.6 percent -- rising from $11.1 billion to $29.5 billion.

According to IDC's market assessment and forecast, the professional services, communications & media, and discrete & process manufacturing sectors will drive the greatest market adoption -- generating the most public cloud services revenue.

Broad Appeal of SaaS Offerings Will Continue
IDC believes that the professional services market, in particular, will be the primary beneficiary of increased public IT cloud service usage -- partly due to the multitude of information-dependent midsize companies that will adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

"This research breaks new ground by sizing U.S. Public IT Cloud services revenue by 18 vertical markets," said Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, a program manager at IDC.

Other findings from the IDC market study include:

• The services and distribution sector -- which includes vertical markets such as retail, wholesale, professional services, consumer & recreational services, and transportation -- contributes the largest share of U.S. public cloud computing services revenue. Currently a $3 billion market, IDC estimates that it will more than double to $8.5 billion by 2014.
• Applications account for more than half of revenues in 2009, but over the forecast period, applications will drop to one-third of the market revenue and infrastructure software will grow to 22 percent of all revenue.
• Verticals that are highly regulated or with serious privacy and security data concerns -- such as government, banking, and healthcare -- will likely limit their spending on public cloud IT services to applications such as email, messaging, and collaboration.

"While the healthcare vertical will represent less than 5 percent of this market's total revenue in 2014, it will experience a high compound annual growth rate of nearly 23 percent through the forecast period. Despite serious concerns about privacy, current healthcare reform and the rise of connected healthcare will lead providers to the public cloud for specific functions such as collaboration applications," Ms. Clarke explained.

According to the IDC definition, public IT cloud services are browser-based and are available to any person or entity. They are off-premise and do not require any dedicated, application-specific, or proprietary client-side hardware or software to support access.

IDC's data is segmented by vertical sectors and then by functional technology categories -- including applications, application development and deployment software, system infrastructure software, servers, and basic storage.