Gartner claims pure-play IaaS providers could be sidelined as enterprise attitudes to cloud mature

IT providers that exclusively specialise in the provision of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings are at risk of becoming niche players in the cloud, predicts Gartner.

The market watcher said enterprises are increasingly favouring providers with integrated IaaS and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities over pure-play cloud infrastructure suppliers, as the market continues to mature.

As a result, providers whose service portfolios are exclusively made up of IaaS offerings may be sidelined in future, said Gartner research director Sid Nag.

"Demand for integrated IaaS and PaaS offerings is driving the next wave of cloud infrastructure adoption," he said.

“We expect that IaaS-only cloud providers will continue to exist in the future, but only as niche players, as organisations 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,” said Nag.

Furthermore, Gartner predicts that by 2022, 90% of organisations will purchase public cloud IaaS services from an integrated provider who can also offer PaaS capabilities.

The prediction coincides with the release of Gartner’s latest round of growth projections for the worldwide public cloud services market, with the analyst house forecasting 17.3% growth for the sector in 2019, with spending set to top $206.2bn – up from $175.8bn this year.

IaaS remains the fastest-growing segment of the overall public cloud services market, and is expected by Gartner to grow 27.9% from $31bn in 2018 to $39.5m next year.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment, however, is still the largest – and looks set to retain that title through to 2021, despite how quickly the IaaS section of the market is growing.

At present, Gartner predicts the SaaS segment will grow by 17.8% to $85.1bn in 2019, and will go on to be worth $113.1bn by 2021, while the IaaS part of the market will be valued at $63bn by then.