- India public cloud services market to grow at a growth rate of 23.1% for 2021-26
- Organisations are looking to increase investments in AI/ML, edge computing, blockchain, and IoT to improve customer experience and business efficiency.
- Enterprises leverage cloud for streamlining operations, cost optimisation, accelerated innovation, increased flexibility, reliability, etc.
Digital transformation is gaining ground in India as there is a surge in digital services and organisations have realised the power of cloud to help them transform digitally
According to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), public cloud services market is expected to reach $13 billion by 2026, growing at an annual growth rate of 23.1 per cent for 2021-26.
In the first half of this year, the India public cloud services (PCS) market, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), revenue totaled $2.8 billion.
SaaS continued to be the largest component of the overall public cloud services market, followed by IaaS and PaaS during the first half of 2022. The top two public cloud service providers continue to hold more than 45 per cent of the market.
Modernising legacy applications
Rajiv Ranjan, Associate Research Director, Cloud and Artificial Intelligence at IDC India, said that organisations are looking to bring new products and services to the market faster through digital streams and increase their investments in technologies like AI/ML, edge computing, blockchain, and IoT to improve customer experience and business efficiency.
“The market also witnessed increased consumption of platform-as-a-service tools as organisations invested in modernising their legacy applications to make them cloud native, highly scalable, and flexible as part of their digital transformation journey,” he said.
With India being a key growth market, cloud service providers continued to expand their presence in the country by unveiling new data centres/cloud regions, thus enhancing their service delivery capabilities. With verticals like BFSI, manufacturing, etc., leading the public cloud adoption, Ranjan said that service providers also continued to witness increased demand from other verticals like the public sector, media, gaming, etc.
5G opens opportunities
Collaboration applications, compute, storage, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource management (ERM), security, etc., continue to be the most demanded public cloud service areas.
There was also a surge in the adoption of cloud-based AI platforms and cloud-native application development.
Harish Krishnakumar, Senior Market Analyst at IDC India, said that demand for public cloud services continues to rise with enterprises leveraging the cloud for streamlining operations, cost optimisation, accelerated innovation, increased flexibility, reliability, etc.
“With more Indian enterprises working on strengthening their digital and smart capabilities, public cloud adoption will continue to be driven by the demand for upgrading legacy systems, omnichannel customer expenses, real-time data analytics, connected platforms, and applications, etc.
“Further, the recent launch of 5G services is expected to open up a gamut of opportunities for enterprises undergoing digital transformation, thus accelerating cloud proliferation.”