Indian public cloud services market to reach $443 mn in 2013

The public cloud services market in India is forecast to grow 36 per cent in 2013 to $443 million, up from $326 million in 2012, according to a report by global research and analyst firm Gartner.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, continues as the fastest-growing segment of the market in India, growing 22.7 per cent in 2012 to $43.1 million. It is expected to grow 39.6 per cent in 2013 to $60.2 million, said a Gartner report.

Software as a Service (SaaS) continues to be the largest segment of the cloud services market in India, comprising 36 per cent of the total market in 2012. Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2017, $4.2 billion will be spent on cloud services in India, $1.6 billion of which will be spent on SaaS.

"The continued growth of the cloud services market will result from the adoption of cloud services for production systems and workloads, in addition to the development and testing scenarios that have led as the most prominent use case for public cloud services to date," said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner.

"Evidence of this growth is found in the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organisations, met by an increased supply of cloud services from suppliers," Anderson added.

Although there is wide variation between cloud services market sub segments, strong demand is anticipated for all types of cloud services offerings. The cloud business process services segment (BPaaS) is the second-largest market segment after SaaS, comprising 23 per cent of the total market in 2012 in India, followed by cloud infrastructure services (Infrastructure as a service [SaaS] ) at 13 per cent, cloud advertising services at 12 per cent, cloud management and security services at 11 per cent, and cloud application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) at 5 per cent.

Market dynamics vary substantially when considering the cloud services market size and market growth across the different regions of the world. In general, the emerging markets in Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa show the highest growth rates, while representing the smallest overall markets. China is the exception, being both a large and growing market. Likewise, the mature markets of North America, Western Europe, Japan and the mature Asia/Pacific countries constitute the larger, but slower-growth, markets.

"IT services providers, particularly those focused on delivering cloud services offerings or related services, must consider these disproportionately large mature markets if they want to play a leading role in cloud services growth worldwide," Mr. Anderson said. "Similarly, markets in Emerging Asia/Pacific, Greater China and Latin America should also be important considerations for IT services providers that want to capitalize on the high growth of these regions, particularly Latin America and Greater China."