Business spending for infrastructure and services related to the cloud will grow 20 percent to $174.2 billion in 2014 from $145.2 billion in 2013, said IHS.
By 2017, enterprise spending on the cloud will amount to a projected $235.1 billion, triple the $78.2 billion in 2011.
“With the cloud touching nearly every consumer and enterprise around the globe, spending for cloud-related storage, servers, applications and content will be dedicated toward building a framework that is rapidly scalable, highly dynamic, available on-demand and requiring minimal management,” said Jagdish Rebello, senior director and principal analyst for the cloud and big data at IHS.
Spending on cloud services, applications, security and data analytics will account for an ever- growing portion of total information-technology expenditures undertaken by enterprises, valued today at approximately $2 trillion.
Gartner says at least 30 percent of service-centric companies will move the majority of their ERP applications to the cloud by 2018.
Andy Kyte, vice president and Gartner Fellow, said: “Early ERP adopters, particularly large enterprises in energy, manufacturing and distribution industries, are paying the penalty of a decade or more of excessive customization. Businesses looking to improve administration today can take advantage of lower costs, better functional fit and process flexibility offered by blending cloud applications with on-premises applications in what we now refer to as ‘postmodern ERP.”
Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are offering public cloud storage to drive adoption of the individual companies’ hardware and content. Barracuda, Dropbox and Carbonite, are adopting the Freemium model — in which premium storage services are available on top of a fixed amount of free storage — in order to compete with the giants.
The number of consumer subscriptions to the cloud will jump to 730 million this year from 630 million in 2013.
Amazonoffers an inexhaustible range of products, and transforming even a casual user of the online giant’s cloud services could well bring in an endless stream of future revenue as the user becomes a loyal and permanent client.
Among the various stakeholders involved in offering cloud infrastructure and services, wireless providers are exceptionally well-situated to offer online cloud storage in order to boost value to their customers.
With the cloud, wireless providers can help reduce churn, a periodic problem as customers defect to other operators. Providers can also use the cloud to seek out demographic information to help them come up with tailor-made offerings for existing clientele.
