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US Public IT Cloud Services Revenue Projected to Reach $43.2 Billion in 2016, Says IDC

US public IT cloud services revenue will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5% during 2011-2016, from $18.5 billion in 2011 to $43.2 billion in 2016, according to a new report by International Data Corporation (IDC): US Public IT Cloud Service by Industry Sector.

The new report focuses specifically on the public cloud services that are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers, open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users, and designed for a market, not a single enterprise. The forecast is segmented by five functional technology categories and by six vertical sectors.

"According to our research, the three verticals that accounted for more than 50% of the spending in 2011 are discrete manufacturing, professional services, and process manufacturing. This is not surprising as these industries are typically less risk averse and compliance focused," said Eileen Smith, program manager in IDC's Global Technology and Industry Research Organization. "Communications and media, education, and construction were found to be the fastest growing verticals. We expect the media portion of the communications and media vertical to continue to be one of the main users of storage on demand to enable continuous service for content-heavy customer offerings."

Additional key findings from the report include:

- Services and distribution, the largest sector, accounted for 30.3% of total revenue in 2011. Professional services alone accounted for nearly 40% of the entire category in 2011.

- Manufacturing and resources, the second-largest vertical sector, accounted for 24.0% of total public IT cloud services in 2011. Discrete manufacturing alone accounted for 46.7% of the entire category in 2011.

- Infrastructure, the fastest-growing sector with a 19.6% five-year CAGR, accounted for 12.3% of spending in 2011 and will account for 12.9% of spending by 2016.

The five functional primary market cloud services segments specifically forecasted in this pivot table are:

- Applications as a service

- System infrastructure software as a service (SaaS)

- Platform as a service (PaaS)

- Server as a service

- Basic storage as a service

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US Public IT Cloud Services Revenue Projected to Reach $43.2 Billion in 2016, Says IDC

US public IT cloud services revenue will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.5% during 2011-2016, from $18.5 billion in 2011 to $43.2 billion in 2016, according to a new report by International Data Corporation (IDC): US Public IT Cloud Service by Industry Sector.

The new report focuses specifically on the public cloud services that are shared among unrelated enterprises and consumers, open to a largely unrestricted universe of potential users, and designed for a market, not a single enterprise. The forecast is segmented by five functional technology categories and by six vertical sectors.

"According to our research, the three verticals that accounted for more than 50% of the spending in 2011 are discrete manufacturing, professional services, and process manufacturing. This is not surprising as these industries are typically less risk averse and compliance focused," said Eileen Smith, program manager in IDC's Global Technology and Industry Research Organization. "Communications and media, education, and construction were found to be the fastest growing verticals. We expect the media portion of the communications and media vertical to continue to be one of the main users of storage on demand to enable continuous service for content-heavy customer offerings."

Additional key findings from the report include:

- Services and distribution, the largest sector, accounted for 30.3% of total revenue in 2011. Professional services alone accounted for nearly 40% of the entire category in 2011.

- Manufacturing and resources, the second-largest vertical sector, accounted for 24.0% of total public IT cloud services in 2011. Discrete manufacturing alone accounted for 46.7% of the entire category in 2011.

- Infrastructure, the fastest-growing sector with a 19.6% five-year CAGR, accounted for 12.3% of spending in 2011 and will account for 12.9% of spending by 2016.

The five functional primary market cloud services segments specifically forecasted in this pivot table are:

- Applications as a service

- System infrastructure software as a service (SaaS)

- Platform as a service (PaaS)

- Server as a service

- Basic storage as a service

Hot Topic

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...