Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

This article was originally published by forbes.com and can be viewed in full here

As we begin to settle into 2016, research groups have started to surface with the analysis from 2015, giving us an interesting view of the massive growth of the Cloud Market. According to a recently published study by Synergy Research Group, the Cloud Market as a whole is growing at an annual rate of 28%, citing that cloud operators and vendors revenues reached $110 billion between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015. The growth rate was spearheaded by the IaaS/PaaS sector which grew 51% followed by Private/Hybrid Cloud services with a growth of 45%.

“In many ways 2015 was the year when cloud became mainstream. Across a wide range of cloud applications and services we have seen that usage has now passed well beyond the early adopter phase and barriers to adoption continue to diminish,” said Synergy Research Group’s founder and Chief Analyst Jeremy Duke.

The cloud becoming mainstream has lead to several moves by the bigger players such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft to establish market share globally. Amazon recently announced the powering up of their first Cloud Data Center in South Korea, their fifth in Asia Pacific. This is an expected move to improve latency across all Asia as desired by other big players, such as Microsoft (who recently opened it’s third data center in India) and IBM (two Softlayer data centers in India).

The moving of these giants has prompted private IaaS providers to make similar moves, as we recently saw French hosting company OVH announce expansion plans into Singapore and Australia, raising $327 million to do so. According to Statista analytics, private web hosting providers made up over 35% of the IaaS cloud market in 2015. This big market share is due to the fact that there are hundreds of regional web hosting providers who also offer cloud services at competitive pricing. “There is definitely anxiety among the smaller hosting companies to get a [point of presence] up in Asia. A few years ago, the U.S. and European markets were ripe, but we have seen the Asian market blow up in the last couple of years. Other U.S. Based hosting companies racing to claim a spot in the Asian markets include cloud pioneer Rackspace with leased data center space in Hong Kong and Australia.

“Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues and high growth rates that will continue long into the future, making this an exciting time for IT vendors and service providers that focus on cloud,” added Synergy Research Group Chief Analyst John Dinsdale.

However, across all the predictions we have learned that the Public and Hybrid cloud sectors are the most lucrative of them all. It is fitting that all providers, big and small, are looking to position themselves comfortably for the wave of technological growth in the Asian market for the past few years. So how are these small and midsize businesses able to achieve a global presence without the multi-million dollar budget? The answer is in the thousands of data centers across the globe from the likes of Digital Realty Trust, DuPont Fabros Technology or Switch, all primarily wholesale data center providers.

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