Business-as-a-Service dominates cloud spending says Gartner

Business-Process-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms are dominating spending in the cloud computing arena, cloudpro.co.uk reports. According to the analyst firm Gartner, BPaaS spending is still ahead of its younger siblings Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), accounting for the majority of cloud spending. These conclusions were gleaned as part of Gartner’s 2012 global IT spending forecast, which takes into account all kinds of IT business spending. While spending in global telecoms services ultimately topped the list – in terms of total spending – cloud computing-based services are tipped to have the most future growth potential. For example, Gartner predicts that investments into public cloud services in the last year alone will have grown from $91 billion (£59bn)in 2011, to $109 billion (£70bn) in 2012. This figure will mushroom to $207billion (£133bn) by 2016. Overall IT spend is predicted to go up to $3.6 trillion (£2.3tn)this year, up three per cent from $3.5 trillion (£2.26tn)in 2011. Despite this relatively small percentage growth, Gartner said that this was still good news considering the economic outlook. According to cloudcomputing-news.net, Richard Gordon, Gartner research vice president, said: “While the challenges facing global economic growth persist – the eurozone crisis, weaker US recovery, a slowdown in China – the outlook has at least stabilised.”