End user expenditure on public cloud to hit $4.4 bn in India: Gartner

The expenditure on public cloud by end users in India is expected to grow 31.4% in 2021 to touch $4.4 billion, according to a forecast from research firm Gartner. 

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), it said, will lead the growth charts at 52.2%, followed by desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) at 47.7%, thanks to the growing remote working trend.  

IaaS will be the largest end-user spending segment at $1.44 billion in 2021, while DaaS is expected to be a $73 million opportunity.  

“Indian CIOs saw the benefits of cloud during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. To build business resilience and minimize the impact of continued disruptions, investing in cloud is unavoidable. India has experienced consistent double-digit growth in cloud spending over the last three years, the pandemic only expedited the shift,” Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner, said. 

According the forecast, SaaS, and cloud management and security services spending will see double digit growth for the first time due to the increasing mobile workforce. While SaaS spending is expected to grow 20.8% to touch $1.41 billion this year, the latter will see an 18% jump to hit $317 million. 

“SaaS has been pivotal in supporting the sudden increase in the mobile workforce, as well as customers, in 2020. Learning from this, Indian CIOs will continue to build on the above trend as they move towards a composable business environment,” Nag said. 

Within SaaS, customer experience, and relationship management and content services will experience their highest jump ever in 2021, growing 24.9% and 26.1%, respectively. Email and authoring is expected to grow 25.1% this year. 

Expenditure on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will hit $997 million this year, growing 30.5% year-on-year, and business process services (BPaaS) is forecasted to touch $207 million from $190 million in the previous year. 

In 2019, Gartner had predicted that end-user spending on public cloud services in India will reach $3.4 billion by 2020, a 25% increase from 2019. In 2019, the end-user public cloud spending stood at $2.64 billion.