Ahead of the publication of major public cloud providers’ quarterly results, research collated by Synergy suggests that revenues stemming from cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) will grow between 23 and 29 percent every year, through to 2022.

An earlier study by the same group found that AWS was responsible 33 percent of the worldwide cloud market in Q1, followed by Azure, IBM and Google Cloud, despite their trailing quite far behind in terms of market share. In total, major cloud providers have approximately 360 hyperscale data centers, and this number is expected to grow 20 percent every year, to the point that it is predicted that such data centers will ‘soon’ bring in 80 percent of all cloud and SaaS revenue and 40 percent of all data center equipment revenue. 

Shedding the burden of ownership

The study predicts that the Asia-Pacific region will experience the highest growth in cloud and SaaS revenues, followed by Europe and the Middle East, and North America.

Specifically, Synergy suggests that public IaaS and PaaS will grow by an average of 29 percent every year, managed and hosted private cloud by 26 percent, enterprise SaaS by 23 percent and that infrastructure sales to major cloud providers will increase by 11 percent annually for five consecutive years. 

As far as Internet-based virtualized computing and managed platform growth are concerned, database and IoT-specific services are expected to feature most prominently. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is predicted to drive SaaS growth.

At the same time, Synergy expects that hardware and software sales to enterprises will dwindle, decreasing by two percent on average every year, reflecting the shift from privately-owned infrastructure to running workloads in the cloud.