32% growth this year, says Gartner.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: The value of the cloud services market in India is expected to hit a record high of over $556 million by the end of 2014.
Growth for the year is projected at 32.2%, which will see India’s cloud sector rise from $421 million in 2013 to $556.8 this year, an increase of $135.8 million. This rapid rate of increase is expected to hold for the next few years, and by 2018, the Indian cloud services market could hit a staggering $1.7 billion in total worth.
The information comes from Gartner, a technology research firm based in Stamford, Connecticut. Their numbers also indicate that Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) will experience a large amount of growth in India, growing from $58 million last year to $78 million this year (a difference of $20 million, or 34.5%).
IaaS is a component of cloud computing, and deals with virtual machines and servers that store the data for cloud-based networks. As cloud services grows, so will IaaS, according to projections, which will hit around $317 million by 2018. Related components – such as Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) – will expand, too.
BPaaS will grow from $62.3 million to $75 million this year ($12.7 million, or 20.4%), and SaaS, which will experience the most growth overall by 2018, will hit $636 million by the end of that year. BPaaS will grow to $204 million by the end of 2018, putting it in third place behind SaaS and IaaS.
Countries around the world are adopting cloud-based systems more and more, as they require less physical storage space, are more cost efficient, and reliable. There are concerns about privacy and accessibility, but adoption of the technology continues to remain high.
A report, released last August, by the MarketsAndMarkets research firm, said that government agencies worldwide will invest over $18 billion in cloud computing by 2018. Investments into cloud computing will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 45.1% annually, as world leaders flock towards the new technology.
“The main benefit of public cloud is that government and public bodies are offered high elasticity and reduced costs for running the applications,” says the report. “Federal, State and Local, and Defense and Military are widely embracing cloud service as it helps in collecting and managing huge amount of data. The most important thing that these government agencies require is a cloud that has effective and able developers to easily integrate it with other parts of the infrastructure.”
India has seen a number of high-tech firms from the US acquire its smaller IT companies because of their work with cloud-based technologies. Start-ups in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune have been picked up by mid-size companies and large corporations alike over the last year as IT firms continue to push towards increasing their cloud computing capabilities.
The growing number of Internet users and increase in mobile device adoption in India is a key factor for its cloud growth, neither of which show much sign of slowing down over the next few years.