Spending on cloud services is expected to cross $10 billion by 2020, driven by factors like investments to set up local data centres and a rapidly growing developer ecosystem in the country, according to research firm Zinnov.

India continues to be a prominent market for cloud technology adoption and public cloud market is likely to cross the $1-billion mark in 2016, Zinnov said in a study titled ‘Indian Public Cloud Market Landscape’.

Public cloud, under which a third-party cloud service provider makes resources like applications and storage available to the general public over the Internet, is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 34 per cent to touch $3.9-4.0 billion by 2020.

Cloud computing frees companies from potentially expensive costs of purchasing, managing and maintaining on-premises hardware and software infrastructure.

What’s driving the market

“With multiple growth drivers like investments in local data centers, maturing channel partner ecosystem, and rapidly growing developer ecosystem, cloud spending will continue to dominate the market landscape and cross the $10 billion mark by 2020, including both public and private cloud spending,” the study said. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is expected to continue to be the biggest spend category within public cloud at $2.6-2.8 billion, followed by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cumulatively accounting for $1.2 billion by 2020.

While the mature enterprise ecosystem is driving significant demand, the vibrant SMB/start-up landscape and government initiatives are indeed bound to increase public cloud consumption going forward, the report said.

IT/ITeS vertical accounts for 35-45 per cent of the total public cloud spending, while massive investments in data centres by technology vendors for banking, financial services and the insurance segment, is driving cloud adoption.

Other sectors like manufacturing, healthcare, retail/e-commerce and telecom are also driving adoption.

“Cloud market will present a $10-billion opportunity by 2020, and this positions India as a strategic market for global cloud vendors. We do expect technology companies to continue to make investments in innovative go-to-market strategies and partnerships, to tap this huge opportunity,” Zinnov Partner and Practice Head Praveen Bhadada said.

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