Public cloud services market in Asia Pac to amount a whopping US$12b in 2016

And the market is expected to reach US$2.89b by the end of 2011.

The Asia-Pacific public cloud services market will increase five fold over the next five years with revenues of US$12billion in 2016, according to Ovum.

Asia-Pacific will increase its share from 16 per cent in 2011, to 18.8 per cent in 2016.

Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst for Market Intelligence commented: “AP public cloud services market will grow at the fastest rate amongst all the regions, growth will be driven by the rapid uptake in SME segment as these enterprises continue to realize the strategic gains associated with the shift to cloud.

Increasingly favorable economic conditions and the fast improving infrastructure environment will serve as a major enabler for uptake of cloud services in this region. In AP, Australia, New Zealand, China and India will grow at faster rates while Japan remains the top contributor to regional cloud services market. “Recent moves by the major cloud service providers to set up datacenters in AP further underline the increasing strategic importance of the region in the global cloud services market”, added Sharma based in Hyderabad.

In terms of the cloud computing service lines globally, SaaS will shrink from 87 per cent of the market in 2011, to 62 per cent in 2016, due to the rise of IaaS and PaaS, which will grow from nine per cent and five per cent, respectively, to 23 per cent and 16 per cent, at the end of the forecast period.

According to Laurent Lachal, Ovum’s cloud computing Senior Analyst, while the market is growing at a fast pace and players such as Amazon and Google are making much progress, the impact of public clouds will not be to render IT departments obsolete, but rather to shift their focus.

He commented: ‘Shifts will include taking a more holistic approach to connecting networks, hardware and software. IT departments will also reduce their emphasis on maintenance and increase their innovation, while being encouraged to take more risks, by giving employees the capacity to tackle high-reward ventures.

“But as ever, preparation is the key to ensuring that cloud computing delivers a positive outcome,” he added.