Infotech Lead India: Gartner estimates that the public cloud services market in India will grow by 36 percent in 2013 to $443 million, compared to $326 million in 2012.
Arup Roy, research director at Gartner, says that Indian companies are likely to increase their IT spending in 2013. The cloud, particularly infrastructure as a service (IaaS), virtualization, data center consolidation and IT modernization tops the list of IT priorities in 2013.
In 2012, around 10 percent of IT budgets were allocated to external services, of which 14 percent was spent on cloud-related initiatives. The trend is expected to continue in 2013. Companies seem to be inclined towards private cloud contracts more than any other market this year.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage and print services, continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the market in India. This segment grew by 22.7 percent in 2012 to $43.1 million and it is expected to grow by 39.6 percent in 2013 to $60.2 million.
Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the cloud services market in India. This segment comprises 36 percent of the total market in 2012. Gartner estimates that from 2013 through 2017, expenditure related to cloud services in India will reach $4.2 billion, of which $1.6 billion will be spent on SaaS.
The cloud business process services segment (BPaaS) is the second-largest market segment after SaaS, comprising 23 percent of the total market in 2012 in India. Cloud infrastructure services (infrastructure as a service [SaaS]) is the third largest segment at 13 percent. Cloud advertising services form 12 percent, cloud management and security services are at 11 percent and cloud application infrastructure services (platform as a service [PaaS]) is at 5 percent.
According to Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner, “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.” Ed says that the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organizations and the increased supply of cloud services from suppliers is proof of the growth potential of the cloud services market in India.
Despite the wide variation seen between cloud services market sub segments, strong demand is anticipated for all types of cloud services offerings.
Anderson commented that it is important for IT services providers to be aware of the varying market dynamics of the cloud services market size and market growth across the different regions of the world to be able to become market leaders.
The emerging markets in Asia/Pacific, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa represent the smallest overall markets, yet have the highest growth rates.
China is both a large and growing market. The markets of North America, Western Europe, Japan and of the countries of Asia/Pacific are mature and constitute the larger but slowly growing markets.
Markets in Emerging Asia/Pacific, Greater China and Latin America should be important considerations for IT services providers that want to capitalize on the high growth of these regions, particularly Latin America and Greater China.
