Business Technology Roundtable

As 2012 draws to a close, a growing number of savvy enterprise CIOs -- and perhaps even more Line of Business leaders -- are joining the momentum towards an increase in the mainstream adoption of managed cloud services. Furthermore, the near-term market outlook for 2013 is particularly bright and the long-term expectations are equally promising -- due mostly to the reported positive experience and results from the early adopters of cloud services across the globe. Peer recommendations are clearly driving this change in the marketplace. Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will be more than $40 billion in 2012 and is expected to approach $100 billion in 2016, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation ( IDC ). Over the 2012–2016 forecast reporting period, IDC believes that public IT cloud services will enjoy a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.4 percent, that's five times the traditional IT industry, as more business leaders ac