Middle East and North Africa Cloud Services Market To Hit $462.3 Million in 2013

Business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS) is the largest segment in the cloud services market, as it accounted for approximately 38 percent of the total Middle East and Northern Africa market in 2012. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) will continue as the high-growth sectors of the cloud service market through 2016. Cloud management and security services will also exhibit strong growth through 2016.

“Cloud services spending continues to outpace other parts of the IT marketplace,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “Worldwide, spending on cloud services will grow 17.7 percent through 2016. In the Middle East and North Africa region, growth is expected to be even higher, around 20.2 percent. Although there are some variations between cloud services segments, overall the outlook is very positive. ”

Within the region, some of the highest growth will be in the SaaS segment, where cloud-based office suites and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions will grow rapidly. Growth is SaaS will be supported by strong growth in cloud application infrastructure services, or PaaS. Overall, the PaaS marketplace will exceed $46 million by 2016 to support a SaaS marketplace of $211 million that same year.

Cloud advertising will continue as the single largest source of spending within the cloud services marketplace. This market will grow from $56.6 billion in 2012 to $192 billion in 2016. Cloud advertising will be fed by strong performance of cloud advertising giant Google, and real-time mobile ad exchange newcomers such as Mobclix.

Growth in public cloud services continues despite continuing global economic uncertainties. End-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 18.6% in 2012 to $110.3 billion and is expected to record a compound annual growth rate of 17.7% from 2011 through 2016.

The Cloud is Winning – Infographic

The results of the latest survey by Gatepoint Research/Avere reveals that 81% of the executive responders already have or are investigating or developing a cloud strategy.

Additional survey findings included the following:

-Respondents place the most value on scalability and flexibility

-81% of respondents already have, are investigating or are developing a cloud strategy

-45% of respondents plan on public cloud use within the next 5 years, 29% plan to use the private cloud and 22% will look to hybrid options

-Respondents report plans to shift to cloud use for on-demand processing, storage and applications

-Security is the number one concern regarding cloud use followed by uncertainty over service provider longevity and interoperability