TechMarketView forecasts £6b UK cloud market by 2014

We have just published our latest comprehensive forecasts for the UK software and IT services (SITS) market, which include our first full assessment of the UK cloud computing market. We expect the UK cloud market to grow from around 6% of UK SITS in 2010 to almost 15% by 2014, valuing it at £6b. This represents a 26% compound annual growth rate, far outstripping any part of the ‘traditional’ SITS market. Our forecasts also confirm that the UK SITS market is in the middle of five consecutive years of decline in real terms (i.e. excluding inflation) – something we have never seen before!

The forecasts are based on TechMarketView’s innovative Asset-Led Market Model (ALMM), a new segmentation model for the IT market. We devised ALMM because we believe that the market model that most IT analyst firms (including TechMarketView!) have been using for the past 20 years is now well and truly past its ‘best by’ date. For example, the categorisation of IT services into ‘outsourcing’ and ‘project services’ is frankly no longer fit for purpose, when services are increasingly being delivered within the context of long term framework ‘outsourcing’ contracts, with individual activities being called off on a ‘project’ basis.

ALMM defines the IT market in terms of the major ‘assets’ that comprise a customer’s traditional environment (for example, infrastructure, applications and business processes) in the context of the service delivery lifecycle (i.e.  design, supply, build, run, support). By turning the traditional market segmentation model on its head, we can now integrate cloud computing seamlessly into our forecasts. The beauty of ALMM is that it can be applied to any asset delivered as a service, such as ‘security’ or even ‘people’!

Of course we accept that there are many interpretations of what constitutes ‘cloud computing’. We speak to many SITS companies that have rebadged their traditional application hosting services as a ‘cloud’ service’. That’s fine by us as, from the customer’s point of view, their applications are running ‘off premise’. But we separate that out from ‘real’ cloud computing and call it Application Provisioning.

It’s completely clear to us that every SITS supplier must have a cloud story – now! The cloud market is moving faster than almost any other ‘next big thing’ we have seen. With ALMM, we think TechMarketView has taken the lead in giving clients a better way of assessing the UK cloud market opportunity.

TechMarketView Foundation Service clients can download the new UK Software and IT Services Market Forecast Update report from the website here. And clients can email us at info@techmarketview.com to get all the forecasts and charts as an XL spreadsheet.

Posted by HotViews Editor at '08:49'