India public cloud market to hit $434M

Public cloud services will climb 37.5 percent to clock US$434 million in India this year, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) seeing strong growth. 

According to a statement released Tuesday by Gartner, this market is projected to see an increase of US$119 million from US$315 million last year. IaaS, comprising cloud computing, storage, and print services, will expand by 41.8 percent this year to hit US$62.5 million. 

Spanning through to 2017, some US$4.2 billion will be spent on cloud services in India, of which US$1.8 billion alone will be on SaaS, the research firm said. 

Ed Anderson, Gartner's research director, noted: "SaaS represents the most mature segment in the cloud services marketplace today, resulting in high rates of adoption. However, IaaS is rapidly being accepted as both a mature technology and an accepted deployment destination for business-critical workloads.

"We predict high demand for SaaS, IaaS, and the services supporting the adoption of these key cloud offerings through our forecast period of 2011 through 2017," he said.

According to Gartner, India will see strong growth across all segments of its cloud services market over the forecast period, with SaaS expected to reach US$176 million this year and US$572 million in 2017. Cloud-based business process services will climb from US$67 million this year to US$180 million in 2017.

At US$434 million, Gartner's forecast for the overall Indian public cloud market is slight lower than its earlier May projection of US$443 million for the year. 

The research firm, though, noted the Asian economic powerhouse was expected to remain one of the fastest growing countries in its cloud forecast, with IT spending in public cloud services forecast to hit US$1.4 billion in 2017.