Remote work requirements will accelerate cloud adoption road maps, fueling public cloud growth

With Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and Alibaba established as the IaaS cloud market leaders, Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) has noted an increase in partner ecosystem activity, particularly among IT services vendors, such as Accenture, Infosys and Cognizant, that are vying for a share of cloud services like migration and implementation.

Consolidation will accelerate as leaders embrace coopetition, evidenced by activity from Microsoft and Oracle that allied to target AWS’ dominance in the IaaS space. This trend will further separate the leaders from the rest of the pack while creating an adjacent opportunity as customers deploy multivendor and hybrid cloud environments — which bodes well for infrastructure specialists such as IBM’s Red Hat and VMware, particularly as the latter maintains its emphasis on being vendor agnostic. Further, TBR expects rising enterprise appetites around technologies like containerized applications will facilitate PaaS market momentum in the near term as customers develop and test the application frameworks internally before making them live on their hybrid architectures.

Overall Forecast

Though the COVID-19 outbreak is impacting the public cloud market, benchmarked vendors with the largest market share are positioned to protect their leadership, as a diverse install base buffers spending slowdowns in industries such as hospitality. Other vendors are relying on strategic investments in areas like data integration and multicloud management to carve footholds in PaaS and become more attractive among infrastructure leaders that are increasingly embracing vendor agnosticism to expand their IaaS addressable market.

Public cloud remains the largest and fastest growing segment of the cloud market. The outbreak of COVID-19 has forced enterprise customers to increase their usage of cloud infrastructure and solutions, a trend that will benefit leading cloud providers and lead to further consolidation in areas such as IaaS and PaaS through the current forecast period. The Public Cloud Market Forecast details how hybrid deployments, new use cases for enterprise apps, and trends in emerging technology will make public cloud even more relevant in the future.