Public cloud services in mature Asia-Pacific markets are expected to grow 8.7 per cent in 2015 to reach US$7.3 billion, up from US$6.7 billion in 2014, according to Gartner.
These markets include Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea.
Cloud management and security services, whose revenues will grow 21 per cent to reach US$234.3 million, continue to be the fastest growth segment among public cloud services.
Gartner defines public cloud services as shared, meterable, elastic and scalable multi-tenanted IT offerings delivered as a subscription-based service to external customers using Internet technologies.
By 2019, Gartner predicts that total spending on public cloud services in mature Asia-Pacific markets will rise to US$12.9 billion.
Cloud advertising will form the majority (51.8%) of this spending, followed by software as a service (25.7%) and infrastructure as a service (8.3%).
Not too far behind will be business process as a service (7.7%) and platform as a service (2.7%).
“Organisations continue to seek out IT solution delivery methods that are more responsive to changing business needs like public clouds,” said Fred Ng, senior research analyst at Gartner.
Ng noted that the key factors driving public cloud adoption include agility, cost benefits, increased innovation with the potential for transformation, and enabling self-service IT.
“Speed of deployment is also a primary driver of cloud usage, potentially capable of reducing setup time from days/weeks to days/hours,” he said.
Chinese public cloud market set to bloom
Public cloud services are also gaining momentum in developing markets, particularly in China, where the public cloud market will more than double over the next five years, from US$1.8 billion in 2015 to US$3.8 billion in 2020, according to Forrester.
Two-thirds of Chinese software decision-makers surveyed by Forrester are making the increased use of public cloud platforms as one of their top priorities for the next 12 months.
Microsoft, Alibaba, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are leading the pack in the Chinese public cloud market, Forrester said.
All three have strong market leadership due to their extensive breadth of platform and application services, broad language support, strong security controls, and outstanding reliability.
Specifically, Alibaba, which recently opened a data centre in Singapore, has the largest number of ecosystems — technology partners, software-as-a-service partners, and consulting partners — in China, while AWS and Microsoft have the strongest product strategy, thanks to their focus on user experience and blending of infrastructure and platform-based services.
