In a troubled economic environment, the public cloud services market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is expected to increase by 24.5% in 2013. In a new report published by the research firm Gartner, the MENA region will generate $462.3 million in revenue during 2013.
Gartner projections also indicated that the growth rate of the public cloud services market in 2012 in the Middle East and North Africa will be 13.4% to $371.2 million compared with $110 billion globally.
Given the pace of growth, Business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS) is largest sector with the acquisition of approximately 38% of the total market size in the Middle East and North Africa during 2012. Gartner expects the segment Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) is the most dynamic, with an increase of investments through 2016. Cloud management and security services will also exhibit strong growth through 2016.
Cloud services spending continue to outpace other parts of the IT marketplace. Worldwide, spending on cloud services will grow 17.7 percent through 2016. In the Middle East and North Africa region, growth is expected to be even higher, around 20.2 percent. Although there are some variations between cloud services segments, overall the outlook is very positive.
In addition to cloud services market, SaaS based services such as cloud-based office suites and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions will grow rapidly. It will be supported by strong growth in cloud application infrastructure services, or PaaS. Overall, Gartner expect PaaS marketplace will exceed $46 million by 2016.
Cloud advertising will grow from $56.6 billion in 2012 to $192 billion in 2016 and will be the single largest source of spending within the cloud services marketplace. Cloud advertising will be supported by strong performance of cloud advertising giant Google, and real-time mobile ad exchange newcomers such as Mobclix.
Another report from Gartner says that the adoption of SaaS has grown dramatically among users of business software solutions and shows 71% of organizations are using SaaS for less than three years. Analysys Mason recently forecast that the global enterprise cloud-based services market will reach $31.9 billion in 2017.