Australian organisations forecasted to spend 20 percent more on public cloud next year

Australian organisations have been forecast to spend close to $5.6 billion on public cloud services in 2019, representing a 20.3 percent increase from last year.

Research and advisory firm Gartner said the increase will be higher than the forecast global growth rate of 17.3 percent, driven by increased demand for software-as-a-service and infrastructure services.

SaaS spending in Australia is projected to reach $3.3 billion in 2019, up 24 percent from this year’s $2.6 billion, while infrastructure-as-a-service is forecast to reach $652 million, a 27 percent increase from $511 million in 2018.

Both segments are forecast to grow steadily into 2021, as well as business process-as-a-service (BPaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and cloud management and security services.

Meanwhile global revenue is slated to reach US$206.2 billion, up from this year’s US$175.8 billion, also driven by increased IaaS spending. Revenue for the segment is forecast to hit US$39.5 billion, up 27.6 percent from US$31 billion.

SaaS is also the largest segment globally with a forecasted revenue of $85.1 billion in 2019, compared to this year’s $72.2 billion.

“The increasing adoption of SaaS applications and other cloud services impacts the management, dissemination and exploitation of enterprise content,” Gartner research vice president Craig Roth said.

“Organisations are steadily — but not exclusively — shifting their content environments to SaaS. Gartner expects that by 2019, the current enterprise content management (ECM) market will devolve into purpose-built, cloud-based content solutions and solution services applications.”

Gartner also predicted that by 2022, 90 percent of organisations will pivot to an integrated IaaS and PaaS when purchasing public cloud IaaS, utilising capabilities from both.

"Demand for integrated IaaS and PaaS offerings is driving the next wave of cloud infrastructure adoption," Gartner research director Sid Nag said.

“We expect that IaaS-only cloud providers will continue to exist in the future, but only as niche players, as organisations will demand offerings with more breadth and depth for their hybrid environments. Already, strategic initiatives such as digital transformation projects resulting in the adoption of multicloud and hybrid cloud fuel the growth of the IaaS market."