Gartner forecasted continued growth of global public cloud services.  The analyst firm projected 17.5% growth in 2019 to $214.3 billion.  The fastest growth rate will be in Infrastructure as a Service which will jump 27.5% to $38.9 billion.  Platform as a Service is expected to rise by 21.8% this year.

“Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry,” said Gartner Research VP Sid Nag.  “At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations.  What we see now is only the beginning, though.  Through 2022, Gartner projects the market size and growth of the cloud services industry at nearly three time the growth of overall IT services.”

Gartner research found that a third of organizations listed cloud investments as a top three investment priority.  Thirty percent of technology providers new software investments are shifting from cloud-first to cloud only.  Thus, SaaS and subscription cloud models will continue to replace license-based software sales.