A new report from cloud-services enabler Parallels predicts explosive growth of cloud adoption by small-to-medium businesses, amid a global market that it says is expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 26% to reach $125 billion by 2016.
In mature markets, the company reported SMBs use an average of five cloud services currently, with the number expected to nearly double to nine services by 2016.
“When you look at cloud adoption today, it’s really become mainstream in terms of businesses adopting cloud services,” said John Zanni, chief marketing officer and VP of strategic alliances for Parallels. “We’ve hit that inflection point.
“There are certain core services that now, frankly, people are not buying services anymore and deploying them – they’re buying them as cloud services today,” he said, adding that e-mail is a primary example.
However, Zanni noted that one of the major challenges for businesses is that their cloud systems are reaching a point where they are becoming difficult to manage. A company’s e-mail services, CRM solution, back-up system and file-sharing system may all be cloud-based, but come from different vendors, Zanni noted, so there is a market opportunity for service providers to expand their cloud services portfolios in hopes of minimizing the complexity and gaining customers.
The fourth annual edition of the Parallels report was first shared with attendees at the recent Parallels Summit 2014 conference in New Orleans, which brings together about 1,200 hosting partners, software vendors, service providers and others in the ecosystem.
Some of the report’s findings include:
- Globally, the cloud services market was $62 billion in 2013. In the United States, the SMB cloud market is now $24 billion and expected to grow at a 17% CAGR, slightly slower than the overall market. Parallels said that the growth is being driven by unified communications and other online business applications.
- Business class e-mail and hosted PBX services are outpacing the overall market, growing at 37% CAGR from $4.8 billion in 2012 to $6.5 billion last year. That communication and collaboration segment is expected to reach $20 billion by 2016.
- Infrastructure-as-a-service is the second-fastest growing segment, projected to reach more than $42 billion by 2016.
- The report also examined the markets in Brazil and Mexico along with 11 other countries. Mexico is expected to be one of the fastest-expanding markets for SMB cloud growth, with a CAGR of 36%, and Brazil at 31%.
Other news related to the conference last week included the announcement that cloud management platform provider CorePlus has partnered with SofCloudIT, which implements Parallels solutions, to target the international telecom and hosting market.
