 The global public cloud market is expected to hit $191 billion by 2020, according to a report released today by Forrester Research. That's a 20% jump from Forrester's last forecast, which was released in April, 2011, that predicted the market would be $160 billion by 2020. It's also a big jump from where the market is today -- Forrester says the market stood at $58 billion at the end of 2013. "You need to update your forecast to keep up with reality," said Andrew Bartels, an analyst with Forrester. "Now we have a new set of numbers to work with. One of the key trends behind this is that the cloud is starting to shift from a complement to a replacement for existing technology." Breaking down the public cloud market into segments, Forrester predicts that the global public cloud platform services will hit $44 billion by 2020, the cloud business services should reach $14 billion and the cloud applications, or software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, will hit $131 billion. |