Public Cloud Services Market Totaled $233.4 Billion in 2019

The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS), grew 26.0% year over year in 2019 with revenues totaling $233.4 billion, according to IDC. Spending continued to consolidate in 2019 with the combined revenue of the top 5 public cloud service providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Google, and Oracle) capturing more than one third of the worldwide total and growing 35% year over year.

"Cloud is expanding far beyond niche e-commerce and online ad-sponsored searches. It underpins all the digital activities that individuals and enterprises depend upon as we navigate and move beyond the pandemic," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. "Enterprises talked about cloud journeys of up to ten years. Now they are looking to complete the shift in less than half that time.

The public cloud services market has more than doubled since 2016. During this same period, the combined spending on IaaS and PaaS has nearly tripled. This highlights the increasing reliance on cloud infrastructure and platforms for application deployment for enterprise IT internal applications as well as SaaS and digital application delivery. IDC expects spending on IaaS and PaaS to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market over the next several years as resilience, flexibility, and agility guide IT platform decisions.

SaaS applications remains the largest segment of public cloud spending with revenues of more than $122 billion in 2019. Although growth has slowed somewhat in recent years, the current crisis serves as an accelerator for SaaS adoption across primary and functional markets to address the exponential growth of remote workers. Looking at the segment results, a combined view of IaaS and PaaS spending is relevant because it represents how end customers consume these services when deploying applications on public cloud.