SaaS Still Dominates Cloud Spending: IDC Research
The VAR Guy believes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) remains the biggest cloud services opportunity for VARs. But don't overlook the SaaS market, folks. Nearly 60 percent of putlic IT cloud services spending will continue to involve SaaS by 2017, according to International Data Corp.
Indeed, IDC cloud research says:
- Spending on public IT cloud services reached $47.4 billion in 2013 and is expected to be more than $107 billion in 2017.
- Over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public IT cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5%, five times that of the industry overall.
- By 2017, IDC expects public IT cloud services will drive 17% of the IT product spending and nearly half of all growth across five technology categories: applications, system infrastructure software, platform as a service (PaaS), servers, and basic services.
- Software as a service (SaaS) will remain the largest public IT cloud services category, capturing 59.7% of revenues in 2017.
The VAR Guy's advice: Master SaaS basics and investigate SaaS leaders like Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce.com. But focus more of your time on IaaS. Figure out how to move customer workloads onto IaaS platforms like VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure or Rackspace. (Artisan Infrastructure is an option for partners that prefer pure channel companies.) Then, figure out how to manage and monetize those workloads for years to come.