The Middle Eastern and Northern African public cloud services market is forecast to grow 15.3 percent in 2012 to total $378.5 million, compared to $111 billion worldwide, according to Gartner. Business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS) is on pace to be the largest segment, accounting for about 52 percent of the total Middle East and Northern Africa market in 2012, while cloud management and security services represents the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market and is expected to grow 41.4 percent in 2012.
“The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and then prioritizing investments in line with the opportunities.”
BPaaS is the largest segment primarily because of the inclusion of cloud advertising as a subsegment. BPaaS is forecast to grow to $195.1 million in 2012, up from $191.7 million in 2011. In 2011, human resources BPaaS services represented about 19 percent of the total public cloud services market, making it the biggest identifiable subsegment in the forecast. By 2016, cloud advertising will become the largest segment accounting for about 22 percent of total public cloud services spending in the Middle East and Northern Africa region.
Software as a service (SaaS) is the next-largest segment and is forecast to grow to $74.6 million in 2012, while IaaS is forecast to grow from $35 million in 2011 to $47.5 million in 2012. Growth in application infrastructure services (also known as platform as a service, or PaaS) will also be high, although it is a smaller market relative to the other segments. PaaS is strategic and considered to be a critical growth driver for other segments, including BPaaS and SaaS. The PaaS segment in the Middle East and Northern Africa region is forecast to grow to $15.8 million in 2012. Cloud management and security services constitute a new forecast segment comprising cloud security services, IT operations management (ITOM) and storage management (including backup and recovery services). The cloud management and security services segment is forecast to grow to $45.5 million in 2012.
Additional information is available in the report “Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 2Q12 Update” at http://www.gartner.com/resId=2126916.
Gartner analysts will examine key industry topics and provide additional insights at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which will take place in Dubai March 5-7, 2013.
