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Nov 8

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Cloud Computing and Enterprise Software Forecast Update, 2012

The latest round of cloud computing and enterprise software forecasts reflect the growing influence of analytics, legacy systems integration, mobility and security on IT buyer’s decisions.

Bain & Company and Gartner have moved beyond aggregate forecasts, and are beginning to forecast by cloud and SaaS adoption stage.  SAP is using the Bain adoption model in their vertical market presentations today.

Despite the predictions of the demise of enterprise software, forecasts and sales cycles I’ve been involved with indicate market growth.  Mobility and cloud computing are the catalysts of rejuvenation in many enterprise application areas, and are accelerating sales cycles.  Presented in this roundup are market sizes, forecasts and compound annual growth rates (CAGRS) for ten enterprise software segments.

Key take-aways from the latest cloud computing and enterprise software forecasts are provided below:

  • Public and private cloud computing will be strong catalysts of server growth through 2015.  IDC reports that $5.2B in worldwide server revenue was generated in 2011 or 885,000 units sold.  IDC is forecasting a $9.4B global market by 2015, resulting in 1.8 million servers sold. Source:  IDC Worldwide Enterprise Server Cloud Computing 2011–2015 http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=228916 
  • 11% of companies are transformational, early adopters of cloud computing, attaining 44% adoption (as defined by % of MIPS) in 2010, growing to 49% in 2013.  This same segment will reduce their reliance on traditional, on-premise software from 34% to 30% in the same period according to Bain & Company’s cloud computing survey results shown below.  SAP is using this adopter-based model in their vertical market presentations, an example of which is shown here.

  • The global Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is growing from $900M in 2011 to $2.9B in 2016, achieving a 26.6% CAGR.  At this projected rate, PaaS will generate an average of $360M a year in revenue between 2011 and 2016.  Gartner projects that the largest segments will be Application Platform Services (aPaaS) which generated 35% of total PaaS spending in 2011, followed by cloud application lifecycle services (12.5).    Source: Market Trends: Platform as a Service, Worldwide, 2012-2016, 2H12 Update Published: 5 October 2012 ID:G00239236.

  • The three most popular net-new SaaS solutions deployed are CRM (49%), Enterprise Content Management (ECM) (37%) and Digital Content Creation (35%).  The three most-replaced on-premise applications are Supply Chain Management (SCM) (35%), Web Conferencing, teaming platforms and social software suites (34%) and Project & Portfolio Management (PPM (33%). The following graphic shows the full distribution of responses. Source: User Survey Analysis: Using Cloud Services for Mission-Critical Applications Published: 28 September 2012