Cloud services are being taken up more broadly by CIOs and business unit managers from both small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and enterprise-scale organisations across Australia in 2011, according to IDC’s ‘APEJ Cloud End-User Survey 2011’.
The survey reveals that 20.6 per cent of respondents are currently using cloud computing, 32.4 per cent are planning to use it within the next six to 12 months and 41.2 per cent will look at it after 12 months.
IDC said the cloud services model – replacing the client/server model as new architecture for solution delivery – is a core ingredient of the industry’s third platform for growth, which also includes mobile devices and apps expanding the edge of the digital world beyond PCs, mobile broadband connecting the edge to the core. Two important technologies are creating value on top of this foundation – ‘big data’ analytics and social technologies.
“The overall IT services market is certainly evolving in multiple ways, most notably by the rapid emergence of cloud-enabled, and cloud-amplifying technologies such as, the ever-expanding ‘species’ of mobile applications, new mobile devices, growing availability of wireless broadband, and explosion of big data tools”, said Raj Mudaliar, senior market analyst, Services, IDC Australia.
Cloud services revenue in Australia is forecast to increase from $470.3 million in 2010, to $2030 million in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34 per cent. These figures include revenue from five major categories of public IT cloud services: applications, application development and deployment, systems infrastructure software, basic storage and servers.
“IDC predicts the emergence of a sizeable opportunity to provide professional services around cloud assessment, planning, workload migration, security best practices, governance, and test case procedures. This is expected to consistently grow during the forecast period,” said Mudaliar.
