Enterprise cloud services: worldwide forecast 2010–2015, the latest report from Analysys Mason, estimates that the global market for enterprise cloud-based services will grow from $12.1 billion in 2010 to $35.6 billion in 2015.
But while parts of the service provision business model will be easy to manage even during such aggressive growth, Steve Hilton, Principal Analyst at Analysys Mason and the report’s author, warns that the unregulated nature of the business, coupled with the need to market sell non-telecoms-centric services could prove to be a problem.
According to the report, the year-on-year growth rate will be 43% in 2011, but will decrease to 13% over the next five years. SaaS will account for 70% of revenue in 2010, while the share taken by IaaS will increase from 30% to 40% over the next five years.
By 2015, registered IT and application partners – such as agents, systems integrators, dealers and direct market resellers – will account for 39% of this revenue. IT and application vendors will take 36%, while telecoms and cable TV operators will take 23%.
Key findings from the report suggest that service operators should bundle cloud-based application and infrastructure solutions with core connectivity. The bottom line here is that the richer the offering the better the value to the end user. This is particularly the case for the SME sector, which the report suggests service providers target in preference to large enterprises.
It also advises traditional IT and application partners to embrace cloud solutions to avoid missing out on more than $14 billion in revenue by 2015, while also suggesting that these vendors should seek out the particularly high revenue opportunities in the developed markets in the Asia–Pacific region, North America and Western Europe.
