We have just updated our Dutch public cloud market sizing and forecast. Key finding: by 2016, enterprise public cloud spend will surpass the €1 billion mark to reach €1.2 billion. Below you’ll find a snapshot of the results.
Dutch businesses will spend €574 million on public cloud services in 2013, an increase of 31% compared to €439 million spent in 2012. Software as-a-service (SaaS) represents the largest portion of public cloud, growing 29% from €298 to €383 million. Infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) is the second largest segment, growing 32% from €107 to €141 million. Platform as-a-service (PaaS) is the smallest section, growing 45% from €34 to €49 million.
For the next couple of years we predict that public cloud spending in the Netherlands will increase from €439 million in 2012 to €1,173 million in 2016, a CAGR of 29%. See figure below.
More in particular:
- Driven by increased general business uptake of marketing, finance, communication and collaboration clouds, spending on SaaS will grow from €298 million in 2012 to €734 million in 2016, a CAGR of 27%.
- Driven by both IT sector and general business uptake spending on compute, store, and backup clouds, IaaS will grow from €107 million in 2012 to €308 million in 2016, a CAGR of 31%.
- Last but not least, driven by both IT sector and general business uptake spending on programmable business (mobile) platform clouds, PaaS will increase from €34 million in 2012 to €131 million in 2016, a CAGR of 41%.
The public cloud is one of the few business IT segments that will show robust growth for the next couple of years. Both telecoms and IT services spend are likely to remain flat or decrease in the foreseeable future, as the Dutch telecoms and software and services industry are struggling to adjust to new business models.
But more can be done to make sure the growth of the public cloud continues to be robust. At a recent roundtable we hosted at the GigaOM Structure Europe event, hosting, cloud, datacenter and SaaS providers commented that policies and regulations are bigger inhibitors to cloud adoption than security and trust. Regulation is necessary to ensure SLA’s are met, uptime & availability is guaranteed, and data is kept at the place where you want it to be. But too much regulation will inhibit cloud adoption. Legal jurisdiction, compliance rules and privacy regulations need to comply with current technology trends. Many of the participants do not feel that is the case at the moment. The latest EU guidelines aim to address these issues.
The Dutch enterprise public cloud spend reflects the structure of the Dutch public cloudscape, which is vibrant and happening, in particular in Finance, Communication, Collaboration and Infrastructure clouds.
We use the NIST definition for cloud which can be downloaded here. Public cloud is only one of the many types of cloud, check out how the METISfiles positions public cloud against seven other computing styles.
The METISfiles believes that on-demand consumption of IT and Telecommunications infrastructure, platforms, software and services will be the new ICT paradigm for the new elastic enterprise. True public cloud services, though much discussed, are still in its infancy but will outpace ICT spending in any other ICT area.
Our upcoming research in 2013 will further size and forecast the public cloud opportunity by segment, by channel, by company size, and by vertical market. If you want to share your view on public cloud trends and developments, please let us know!
