By Telecom Lead Team: The cloud based services market is expected to grow from
$31 billion in 2011 to $82 billion by 2016. The growth will be driven by
opportunities in mobility and vertical markets.
At the recently concluded CES 2012,
cloud products and services were in abundance, due to the increasing demand for
easy to use, flexible, and high availability solutions for accessing
information.
With demonstrated cost savings and
diminished security fears, all three types of cloud services – SaaS, IaaS and
PaaS – are growing rapidly due to cloud computing’s cost saving opportunities
and diminished security concerns. Cloud computing offers compelling
alternatives to CEOs, CFOs and operations managers who are reviewing IT and
data center budgets,” said Andrew Brown, director, Enterprise Practice,
Strategy Analytics.
Mobile operators now have an opening
to generate significant revenue through offers of more secure road warrior
applications. Proprietary corporate information – long vulnerable to security
breaches because of lost smartphones and mobile PCs – will be less vulnerable
with appropriate cloud programs. By hosting mobile applications in the cloud,
mobile operators can help CIOs increase security and return wireless
applications back under IT control.
The Strategy Analytics Extended
Enterprise Software Strategies (EESS) service report, Global Cloud Computing
Services Forecast and Analysis: Software, Infrastructure and Platform
Development as a Service Move to the Mainstream,” shows that cloud services
have achieved mainstream status, as demonstrated by the proliferation and
diversity of cloud offerings.
Recently,
AMI said that service providers such as telcos, MSOs and hosting companies are
set to gain mindshare and become an important route to market (RTM) for small
and medium businesses for acquiring cloud solutions.
SMB cloud services spending and
investments through service providers will increase
In
emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil and Russia, SMB cloud services
spending and investments through service providers will increase nearly
six-fold from $111 million in 2011 to $615 million by 2015. This represents a
4-year annual growth rate of 54 percent, the largest among all RTMs tracked by
AMI and far outpacing the growth in total SaaS spending over the same period.
Larger
telcos and service providers are in the process of acquiring smaller VARs and
local channel partners/resellers. The acquisition of these partners allows
service providers to diversify their product portfolios and enter the cloud
market by providing basic SaaS solutions (such as accounting, business
intelligence/analytics, email and CRM). This is an important step for many
telcos and MSOs, as they believe that their traditional offerings such as
voice, data and video services will begin to enter a phase of modest growth
over the next couple of years.
