As big as the cloud computing services market is, and no matter how fast it grows, not all the growth is "net" expansion of the infomation technology industry. Some significant amount of cloud spending replaces former legacy investments in hardware, software, services and facilities.
And while everyone expects a continued shift to hybrid environments, the eventual pattern of cloud and dedicated or otherwise shared resources remains a bit unclear. The economics of infrastructure generally shift with scale. For many apps, at some point private cloud using "owned" resourdes costs less than public cloud spending.
Where the global cloud computing services revenue was about $409 billion in 2021, and computing hardware will generate about $300 billion in 2022, business software created about $430 billion in 2021.
If total software revenue in 2021 was about $968 billion, then consumer software generates up to $269 billion, subtracting all the business software revenue and then cutting the remainder by half to account for software as a service delivery.
Then there is the system integration business, which might represent another $328 billion in annual revenues.
The point is that cloud computing might represent about 24 percent of the $1.7 trillion global computing industry. But not all the spending represents net growth. By definition, cloud services replace hardware, software and services that otherwise would have been deployed some other way.
As use of cloud mechanisms grows, spending in other information technology categories will often decrease, obviously.
No comments:
Post a Comment