Public Cloud Services Revenues Grew 29.0 Percent in 2021

The worldwide public cloud services market, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service - System Infrastructure Software (SaaS - SIS), and Software as a Service - Applications, grew 29.0% in 2021 with revenues totaling $408.6 billion, according to IDC.

Spending continued to consolidate in 2021 with the combined revenue of the top 5 public cloud service providers (Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, Google, and SAP) capturing nearly 40% of the worldwide total and growing 36.6% year over year. With offerings in all four deployment categories, Microsoft captured the top position in the overall public cloud services market with 14.4% share in 2021, followed closely by Amazon Web Services with 13.7% share.

"Organizations continued their strong adoption of shared public cloud services in 2021 to align IT investments more closely with business outcomes and ensure rapid access to the innovations required to be a digital-first business," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC. "For the next several years, leading cloud providers will play a critical role in helping enterprises navigate the current storms of disruption (inflation, supply chain, and geopolitical tensions), but IT teams will also focus more on bringing greater financial accountability to the variable spend models of public cloud services.

While the overall public cloud services market grew 29.0% in 2021, revenue for foundational cloud services that support digital-first strategies saw revenue growth of 38.5%. This highlights the increasing reliance of enterprises on a cloud innovation platform built around widely deployed compute services, data/AI services, and app framework services to drive innovation. IDC expects spending on foundational cloud services (especially IaaS and PaaS elements) to continue growing at a higher rate than the overall cloud market as enterprises leverage the cloud to overcome the current disruptions and accelerate their shift toward digital business.

While both the foundational cloud services market and the SaaS - Applications market are led by a small number of companies, there continues to be a healthy long tail of companies delivering cloud services around the globe. In the foundational cloud services market, these leading companies account for nearly three-quarters of the market's revenues with targeted use case-specific PaaS services or cross-cloud compute, data, or network governance services. The long tail is more pronounced in the SaaS- Applications market, where customers' growing focus on specific outcomes ensures that over two-thirds of the spending is captured outside the top 5.