Driven by a surge in public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) sales, the cloud service market grew 28 percent annually, according to a new Synergy Research report. According to the research firm, public IaaS/PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 51 percent, followed by private and hybrid cloud infrastructure services at 45 percent, but all of the segments grew by at least 16 percent.
Although spending on network hardware and software still outpaces cloud service spending, Synergy said the "gap is narrowing rapidly."
Between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the third quarter of 2015, total spending on infrastructure hardware and software to build cloud services surpassed $60 billion, while spending on private clouds accounting for over half of the total but spending on public cloud grew faster.
Cloud service providers investments in network infrastructure helped them generate $20 billion in revenues from cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, private & hybrid services) and a further $27 billion from SaaS as well as supporting internet services such as search, social networking, email and e-commerce. Finally, Synergy noted that UCaaS, while a different segment, is also growing steadily and driving what it says are "some radical changes in business communications." Release