Public cloud services revenue will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent through 2018 from $45.7 billion in 2013, said IDC.
“Software for data management, data access, and collaborative information sharing continues to lead the growth in the overall software industry,” said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.
IDC said cloud software spending represented almost 86 percent of the total public cloud services market in 2013 while cloud infrastructure held the remaining 14 percent.
The SaaS category has been mainly driven by enterprise applications solutions, such as enterprise resource management (ERM) and customer relationship management (CRM), followed by collaborative applications.
Holding a smaller share of the SaaS category are System Infrastructure Software solutions, such as Security and Storage software.
SaaS service provider ecosystem is largely led by Salesforce.com followed by ADP and Intuit. Traditional software vendors like Oracle and Microsoft hold the 4th and 5th position respectively.
The PaaS market has been largely driven by Integration and Process Automation solutions, Structured Data Management solutions, and Application Server Middleware.
The market is led by Amazon.com, followed by Salesforce.com and Microsoft tied for the number 2 position. GXS and Google hold the 4th and 5th positions, respectively.
The Cloud Infrastructure product group is comprised by only one product category: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), which at the same time is comprised by two markets, Server and Basic Storage.
The top 5 vendors in this market are Amazon.com, which holds the first position with more than 40 percent of market share, RackSpace, IBM, CenturyLink, and Microsoft.
United States holds almost 68 percent of the market, which is more than what it holds for traditional technologies.
Western Europe holds 19 percent and the rest of the regions hold 5 percent or less each.
By 2018, the U.S. share will drop to 59 percent while Western Europe will grow to 23 percent of market share. Emerging regions are also expected to grow above worldwide average.