IaaS and PaaS combination in demand from public cloud buyers

Resellers looking for an idea of where cloud sales should come from next year might want to take an approach the combines IaaS and PaaS.

Gartner has been looking into its crystal ball and concluded that 2019 will deliver a 17.3% increase in public cloud services, which will follow on from an expected 21% growth in 2018.

The majority of that growth in spending will be directed towards Infrastructure as a Service offerings but the analyst house is expecting that 90% of the customers who go for IaaS will do so from a provider that can also provide Platform as a Service.

"Demand for integrated IaaS and PaaS offerings is driving the next wave of cloud infrastructure adoption," said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

“We expect that IaaS-only cloud providers will continue to exist in the future, but only as niche players, as organizations will demand offerings with more breadth and depth for their hybrid environments. Already, strategic initiatives such as digital transformation projects resulting in the adoption of multicloud and hybrid cloud fuel the growth of the IaaS market," he added.

SaaS is also still an area expecting growth with Gartner forecasting 17.8% improvements in revenue next year.

“The increasing adoption of SaaS applications and other cloud services impacts the management, dissemination and exploitation of enterprise content,” Craig Roth, research vice president at Gartner.

“Organisations are steadily — but not exclusively — shifting their content environments to SaaS. Gartner expects that by 2019, the current enterprise content management (ECM) market will devolve into purpose-built, cloud-based content solutions and solution services applications,” he added.

The SaaS market might be growing but it is also posing challenges for resellers as it undergoes some changes due to the intense vendor competition in that space.

A market analysis of the SaaS arena from Synergy Research Group not only echoed that the segment was set for growth for years to come but there was also plenty of change happening.

"There is a fascinating battle for SaaS playing out, with traditional enterprise software vendors slugging it out with born-in-the-cloud vendors like Workday, Zendesk, ServiceNow and Dropbox,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group.

“The latter group are helping to rapidly transform the market, but the more traditional players like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM still have a huge base of on-premise software customers that they can convert to a SaaS-based consumption model. Meanwhile Cisco and Google too are making ever-bigger inroads into the SaaS market, via Cisco’s collaboration apps and software vendor acquisitions and Google’s G Suite," he added.