A highlight of European cloud services market growth will be the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, which is expected to increase from €7.6bn to €11.6bn. The healthcare and finance/insurance industries will increasingly invest in security and server backups due to regulatory requirements. Professional and technology/science industries will also lead the adoption of IaaS.
“Increasingly, we see more and more SMBs realising the business benefits of cloud adoption, and as a result we see businesses are not asking why or how they will adopt the cloud, but when,” said Jacek Murawski, Odin EMEA General Manager and Vice President.
Organisations now making the move to cloud services recognise the benefits of security, resilience, flexibility, scalability and business continuity. By becoming cloud adopters, organisations can be safe in the knowledge that their IT is secure, which enables them to focus on their core business needs and do what they do best.
Other highlights from the Odin SMB Cloud Insights™ report include:
While IaaS is expected to command the largest market opportunity for cloud services among SMBs, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is expected to have the largest CAGR over the next three years (21 per cent, from €4.3bn today to €7.5bn in 2018).
Growth among hosted unified communication services is expected to rise to €6.3bn and web applications will rise to €4.7bn by 2018.
Across the core cloud services used by SMBs by 2018, 38 per cent is expected to be composed of IaaS, with SaaS having a share of 25 per cent; 21 per cent will be composed of hosted unified communications services and 16 per cent will be composed of web hosting.
62 percent of SaaS application sales take place only after the buyer completes a free trial of the application.
The majority of SMBs identified the biggest driver behind hosted business voice services adoption as major changes to the business model (49 per cent), followed by price (24 per cent) and office location changes (16 per cent).
