Enterprise spending on cloud computing growing at a faster rate than overall IT spending, Gartner cloud forecaster Ed Anderson believes.
Cloud computing is forecast to grow 19 per cent in 2012, becoming a $109bn industry, up from $91bn last year.
In the next four years, it's expected to nearly double to $207bn, according to Anderson's latest findings.
That compares to the 3 per cent growth expected in the overall global IT market.
The hottest five investments cloud services in the coming year will be:
- infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which is expected to grow by 41 per cent
- Management and security is expected to rise 27.2 per cent
- Platform as a service rising 26.6 per cent
- SaaS up 17.4 per cent
- Business process as a service up 15 per cent
The cloud industry has a long way to go, as it only represents a 3 per cent chunk of the overall $3.6tr spent on IT globally.
In the long term, Anderson says, the cloud model will create new IT spending opportunities. Integration, customisation, hybrid cloud and on-premise cloud installations will all grow as investment channels as cloud adoption continues.
"There will be some short-term decline, but in the long term, it will level out," he says.
Meanwhile, computing hardware sales are expected to rise only 3.4 per cent this year to $420 bn, which compares to 7.4 per cent growth in 2011.
Enterprise software, after increasing 9.8 per cent in the same period, is expected to reach $281bn this year, a 4.3 per cent rise.
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