Cloud & Hyperscale Growth Forecast Presents both Opportunity and Major Challenges

RENO, NV, July 17, 2017

New cloud forecast data from Synergy Research Group shows that worldwide revenues from cloud and SaaS services will grow at an average annual rate of 23-29% over the next five years, passing the $200 billion milestone in 2020, which will help to pull through 11% annual growth in sales of infrastructure to hyperscale cloud providers. Meanwhile, revenues from the sale of hardware and software to enterprise data centers will continue to slowly decline, reflecting the ongoing shift in workloads from privately owned infrastructure to the public cloud. Across the major cloud service categories, public IaaS/PaaS will see the strongest growth at an average 29% per year, while managed or hosted private cloud service revenues will grow by 24% per year and enterprise SaaS 23%. Strong growth will continue to be seen across all of the major cloud service segments, with some of the highest growth being seen in database and IoT-oriented IaaS/PaaS services, and ERP within enterprise SaaS. APAC will be the highest growth region, followed by EMEA and North America.

Synergy’s hyperscale operator tracking research shows that the 24 hyperscale companies now have a global footprint comprising over 360 large data centers. As this figure continues to grow by almost 20% per year, the hyperscale companies are increasingly dominating the cloud market. They will soon account for over 80% of all cloud and SaaS service revenues and almost 40% of spend on all public and private data center equipment.

“As cloud markets reach a massive scale, growth rates will inevitably tail off, but our latest forecasts are still showing that over the next five years we will still see some really robust growth,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group. “As cloud continues to dramatically reshape the IT world it is also clear that the hyperscale phenomenon continues to dramatically reshape cloud. Hyperscale operators are diminishing the growth opportunity for traditional non-hyperscale service providers and are also seriously challenging the technology vendor community to rethink its position in the new world.”