The findings are part of the Odin 2015 Global SMB Cloud Insights™ report, which identifies critical trends in cloud and assesses their impact on SMBs on a global scale, across a variety of regions. The findings revealed that the SMB cloud services market is valued globally at $98.7B, and is expected to increase by a CAGR of 17 percent to $158B by 2018.
Breaking this down further, the report provides insight into predicted growth patterns within the SMB cloud services market. Sub-Saharan Africa is set to achieve the largest CAGR of 28.8 percent, lifting its value from $2.3B to $5B. Latin America and the Caribbean follow at 23.5 percent, ahead of East Asia, South Asia and Pacific regions, all with a CAGR of 21 percent. North America is expected to have the largest market value, with a CAGR of 21.1 percent, raising its value to $51.8B over the next three years.
Jacek Murawski, EMEA general manager and vice president, Odin, suggested that the scalability and flexibility of cloud is ideally placed to support emerging international markets. The lack of an existing IT infrastructure means these markets are able to bypass traditional concerns associated with expensive capital expenditure (CapEx) costs and instead harness the benefits of both software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services, which are also identified in the report.
“The growth and availability of cloud services will play a pivotal role in restructuring the global IT landscape. Typically, the biggest challenge established markets have when it comes to cloud adoption has centred on the migration from old physical systems. Businesses, particularly SMEs, have been reluctant to do away with their existing infrastructure, highlighting concerns surrounding security and loss of control as to where their data is stored,” Murawski said.
“For emerging markets, being unburdened by legacy IT infrastructures, has meant they are ideally placed to leapfrog more mature markets when it comes to embracing new technologies, as they do not have the traditional costs associated with CapEx budgets. Historically, we have seen this pattern most notably in mobile communications and mobile business applications. Cloud similarly offers an opportunity for far-sighted businesses to achieve leadership positions,” he said.
Murawski added, “Cloud appears to be an obvious fit, as it can help remove barriers to costly technology, opening opportunities for new services and products. A key objective of cloud is to encourage small business owners, new entrepreneurs, non-profit organisations and academia, to collaborate and share knowledge. As more and more organisations embrace cloud services across different global regions, we expect these numbers to continue increasing.”
Other highlights in the 2015 Global SMB Cloud Insights™ report include:
- The European and Central Asia market is valued at $26.2B and this is expected to increase by a CAGR of 17.8 percent to $42.9B by 2018.
- North America has the largest SMB cloud services market size to date valued at $36.6B. This is then followed by Europe and Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia and Pacific regions, Latin and Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa respectively.
- IaaS commands the biggest market share globally to date accounting for $37.8B. This figure is expected to increase to $56.2B by 2018, with emerging markets ideally placed to reap the benefits of having a limited legacy IT infrastructure in place.
- Business applications, also defined as SaaS, is expected to achieve the best CAGR over the next three years accounting for a growth of 25.9 percent.
