Public cloud ecosystem revenue soars in line with enterprise demand for services during Q1

Revenue generated by the activities of the global public cloud service and infrastructure market’s players was up 26% year-on-year during the first quarter of 2022, fuelling demand for more hyperscale datacentres.

That is according to the public cloud ecosystem tracking data accrued by IT market watcher Synergy Research Group, which revealed that the total revenue generated by operators and suppliers in this sector topped $126bn during the first three months of 2022.

Much of the revenue growth was linked to the increasing demand for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, with Synergy’s data showing that these flavours of cloud services generated $44bn in revenue during Q1, which equates to a year-on-year rise of 36%.

The other big, revenue-generating segments of the market included managed private cloud services, enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) and content delivery networks (CDN), which collectively brought in $54bn, which is up 21% on last year.

In line with this, the amount of money being ploughed into the building, leasing and kitting-out of datacentres needed to underpin these various types of cloud services topped $28bn during the first quarter of 2022, which equates to a rise of 20% on the previous year.

“Public cloud-related markets are typically growing at rates ranging from 15% to 40% per year, with PaaS and IaaS leading the charge,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. “Looking out over the next five years, the growth rates will inevitably tail off as these markets become ever more massive, but we are still forecasting annual growth rates that are generally in the 10% to 30% range.”

While the demand for public cloud ecosystem services is growing strongly in all geographies, the US remains a “centre of gravity” for this market, according to Synergy’s data.

This shows that the US accounted for 44% of all cloud service revenues and 51% of hyperscale datacentre capacity during Q1. And across all service and infrastructure markets, the vast majority of leading cloud firms are US-based, while the rest are mainly Chinese firms, said the market watcher.

Dinsdale said that if the market is to keep growing at the rate it is now, operators and suppliers will need to invest even bigger sums in building out their datacentre footprints.

“To enable cloud service markets to keep up with demand by doubling in size in the next three to four years, the major cloud providers need an ever-larger footprint of hyperscale datacentres and more raw computing power, which then drives the markets for datacentre hardware and software,” he said.

“For sure, the competition will be tough, but up and down the cloud ecosystem there will be a bright future for companies that bring the right products to market in a timely fashion.”