Gartner: APJ Region Sees Continued Cloud Growth
According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in the Asia/Pacific and Japan region is set to grow to $7.4 billion in 2015 – a 14.2 percent increase over last year’s $6.5 billion achievement. Within the cloud services market, the most notable sector that is expected to outperform all other is the cloud security and management sector. The expectation for this area is set at 29.9 percent growth in 2015 to $264.5 million. Additionally, Gartner predicts that total cloud spending in this region will increase to $11.5 billion by 2018 – a 55% uptick over 2015’s prediction.
While Software as a Service (SaaS) is still the leader by far as it is expected to account for 21.5% of the cloud services market share by 2018, and it will likely continue to be the leader for the foreseeable future, what’s telling is that Gartner also predicts that Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) will capture 9.2% of the market share. Additionally, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is predicted to make up 9.2%, while PaaS and cloud security services will have a much smaller share of the pie (3% and 4% respectively).
The global economic downturn has taken a toll on most industries worldwide, with very few exceptions, one of which is the public cloud service market. Furthermore, in regard to software and communications, the Asia/Pacific and Japan region is still widely considered an emerging market, with an immense amount of growth potential. Even though many analysts are attributing the surge to new business dealings, the fact remains that this region already has a steady base of technological infrastructure in place. Ed Anderson, research VP at Gartner, backed this up by saying, “Many countries in the mature Asia/Pacific Japan region have solid reliable telecommunications infrastructure and relatively advanced technology usage profiles. Despite challenges in the global economy, we expect consistent and stable growth to continue through to 2018.”
However, the current infrastructure is not the only factor that can be credited for the growth. For decades, and likely due to politics, there have been limits on local businesses in regard to operating in other intra-regional (APJ) markets. Now with new partnerships and “treaties,” local businesses will no longer be held back. Fred Ng, who is a senior research analyst at Gartner, also mentioned, “Increased intra-region integration in APJ across services and industries will drive public cloud usage as countries in this region break down borders through trade bloc agreements such as the ASEAN Economic Integration 2015 and the Trans Pacific Partnerships, which will drive more mobility, big data sharing and analytics and public cloud infrastructure and applications to support these initiatives.”
