Australia Cloud services Revenues to Quadruple by 2015

The market has shown rapid but varying levels of maturation. The most apparent difference in 2011 is the broader uptake of cloud services by CIOs and business unit managers from both small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) and enterprise-scale organisations across Australia.

IDC’s APEJ Cloud End-User Survey, 2011 across SME and enterprise scale organisations in Australia (n=102) reveals that 20.6% of respondents are currently using cloud computing, 32.4% planning to use it within the next 6 to 12 months and 41.2% after 12 months.

IDC believes that the cloud services model is just one core ingredient of what we see emerging as the industry’s third platform for growth.

This third platform’s core ingredients are mobile devices and apps expanding the edge of the digital world beyond PCs; cloud services replacing the client/server model as new architecture for solution delivery; and mobile broadband – 4G and beyond – 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”, says Raj Mudaliar, Senior Market Analyst, Services, IDC Australia.

Cloud services revenue in Australia is forecast to increase from AUD$470.3 million in 2010, to AUD$2,030 million in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 34%.

This forecast looks specifically at revenue from five major categories of public IT cloud services. These include Applications, Application Development and Deployment (AD&D), Systems Infrastructure Software, Basic Storage and Servers.

This taxonomy is, by far, the most widely adopted model for describing and analysing the marketplace by IT vendors, customers and investors. 29% of the respondents in the end user survey for Australia indicated that they are using or planning to use a vPC.

Virtual private clouds (vPC) are cloud services provided through a secured network by a cloud service provider but not necessarily to a single enterprise and therefore not a private cloud by definition.

It was seen as a way of mitigating some of the risk continuing to be of concern to early mainstream public cloud users in the areas of security, availability and reliability. IDC therefore has included vPCs in IDC’s forecast for 2011–2015.

“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,” says Raj.

Australia Cloud Services 2011-2015 Forecast and Analysis, September 2011 provides IDC's analysis of the current public cloud services market in Australia and a forecast for the next five years. The report analyses the impacts on the IT industry and customer adoption shifts across the five cloud services categories.

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