Public cloud services revenue in India to grow 24% in 2019: Gartner

Public cloud services revenue in India is projected to total $2.4 billion in 2019, an increase of 24.3% from 2018, according to a research firm Gartner.
India will account for only 1.2% of the global public cloud services revenue in 2019 but ranks among the nine countries whose growth rate will be higher than the global average of 16%, Gartner said. 

India is likely to record the third-highest growth rate in 2019, after China (33%) and Indonesia (29%), taking into consideration that their revenue base is much smaller than those of mature markets, it added.

“The shift from ‘cloud first’ to a ‘cloud only’ model is pushing organizations in India to increase their spending on public cloud services to advance their digital business initiatives. Disinvestments in new data centers are also one of the early signs of this move,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

According to Gartner, its CIO agenda survey found out that 34% of chief information officers in India are likely to increase their spending on cloud services in 2019.

Nag said that organizations want to reduce capital expenditure by consolidating existing data centers and halting the build out of new ones.

Further, the report claimed that cloud application services (SaaS) are on pace to be the fastest-growing market in India in 2019, accounting for nearly half of total public cloud services revenue. SaaS revenue is estimated to grow 23% in 2019 to reach $1.15 billion. It is followed by cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) spending, which is estimated to grow 22% in 2019.

The growth of SaaS spending is fueled by increased end-user spending on customer relationship management (CRM), as organizations in India move away from commercial off-the-shelf and license-based on-premises software to a subscription-based SaaS model to gain agility, innovation and cost efficiency, Gartner said.
“Moving to the cloud is one thing, but CIOs need to ensure operational control of the virtual organization. It isn’t about whether the cloud is secure; it’s about how securely the enterprise is using it,” said Rajpreet Kaur, principal research analyst.

Yesterday, Gartner had reported that worldwide spending on customer relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% year-on-year to $48.2 billion in 2018.

Last week, Gartner revealed in a survey that three-quarters of organisations globally increased their investments in customer experience technology last year.