End-user spending on cloud services to increase by 25% in 2020: Gartner

India is catching up with other entrants in the emerging technology space— China and Indonesia— at least in terms of end-user spending on public cloud services.  

End-user spending on public cloud services in India is projected to touch $3.4 billion by 2020, a 25% increase from 2019, according to research firm Gartner.

In 2019, the end-user public cloud spending stood at $2.64 billion.

The double-digit growth will position India in the third place for end-user spending on public cloud services, right after China and Indonesia.

Several companies talk about being on the cloud, but most are still burdened with legacy infrastructure and on-premise systems.

The software-as-a-service model has accelerated the digital journeys of companies. SaaS helps organisations lower operational costs as it provides a subscription-based usage compared to the more expensive alternative, license-based on-premise consumption models. The SaaS model has done particularly well in India, given the price-sensitive nature of the market. 

 “It’s no longer a question of ‘why’, but a matter of ‘when’ organisations can shift to the cloud,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

Nag also pointed out that we have now entered the cloud 2.0 era, where organisations are adopting a cloud-first or cloud-only strategy.

Cloud application services segment is also expected to see huge cash flow,  accounting for  42% of all the public cloud end-user spending in 2020. Meanwhile, end-user expenditure on SaaS cloud applications is set to total to $1.4 billion by 2020 in India, which is an increase of close to 21% year on year.

Consolidation in the cloud services market owing to disinvestment in data centres by niche cloud providers is also expected to accelerate the cloud services market.

 “The disinvestment in datacenters has increased opportunities for hyperscale vendors, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Alibaba, to disrupt the cloud infrastructure services market rapidly,” said Nag.

By 2021, 90% of global enterprise customers who use infrastructure as a service will take a multi-cloud approach, predicts Gartner.