Gartner Bullish On Cloud Computing

As per recent findings of the technology research firm Gartner Inc., the global cloud service market is expected to grow substantially with revenue expected to reach $148.8 billion by 2014. The market research firm is of the opinion that the cloud computing market will grow exponentially by 16.6%, generating revenues of $68.3 billion in 2010 and reaching $148.8 billion by 2014 from $58.6 billion in 2009.

The detailed study by the market researcher reveals that the U.S. had a 60.0% share of the worldwide cloud services market in 2009, which is expected to dip by ten percentage points to around 50.0% by 2014, whereas other countries that have started adopting cloud computing more aggressively would account for the growth.

Apart from the U.S, Western Europe is expected to capture 23.8% of the cloud services market in 2010, while Japan will take a 10.0% share. By 2014, the UK is expected to comprise a 29.0% share of the total market, with Japan's share reaching around 12.0% of total cloud services revenue.

While the U.K.'s budget restructuring program outlines plans to implement budget cuts to the different government departments, the government itself is expected to adopt cloud computing services aggressively, which they believe will lead to lower IT costs across sectors. So this will be a clear driver of cloud computing growth in the U.K.

The technology research major also believes that the financial services, manufacturing, communications and technology industries are the largest adopters of cloud computing services and will continue to generate volumes in this segment.

Sensing the huge opportunity, CA, Inc. (CA - Analyst Report) has come out with a new technology, CA Agile Vision, which runs on the Force.com platform provided by the cloud computing major Salesforce.com (CRM - Analyst Report). CA Agile Vision was designed to provide a competitive edge to the user through application development management technology on a cloud computing platform. The teaming up of cloud computing-based companies is becoming common, making the competition in this field much stiffer.

Recently, another global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, VMware (VMW - Snapshot Report), teamed up with search-engine giant Google (GOOG - Analyst Report). The purpose of the collaboration was to make cloud applications more productive, portable and flexible.

Meanwhile, competition continues to intensify in the software & cloud computing space, as big players like IBM (IBM - Analyst Report), Hewlett Packard (HPQ - Analyst Report) and Dell (DELL - Analyst Report) scramble to grab the leading market share in this space.

Gartner is of the opinion that security, availability of service, vendor viability and maturity of technology remain some of the concerns to be resolved, which will take cloud computing to new heights.

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