The African continent is one of the regions where industries like manufacturing, banking and professional services had the highest public cloud services expenditure in 2015.
This is according to the International Data Corporation (IDC), which says these three industries were also spending leaders in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East.
The manufacturing industry spent $8.6 billion on public cloud services, followed by banking and professional services at $6.8 billion and $6.6 billion, respectively.
The IDC also expects telecommunications, which was the second largest industry in terms of public cloud services spend in the Asia/Pacific region, to move into the top position by 2019.
"Cloud services will remain the essential foundation of the IT industry's third platform of innovation and growth. As the cloud market enters an 'innovation stage', there will be an explosion of new solutions and value creation on top of the cloud," says Eileen Smith, programme director, customer insights and analysis.
"Industry-specific applications will be a driving force as businesses look for solutions that can be easily configured to their unique business and vertical requirements. With the huge increase in the number and diversity of services available in the market, organisations across the industries will shift steadily toward cloud-first strategies to enable digital transformation," adds Smith.
Meanwhile, the research firm expects worldwide spending on public cloud services to grow at a 19.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), from almost $70 billion in 2015 to more than $141 billion in 2019.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will remain the dominant cloud computing type, capturing more than two-thirds of all public cloud spending through most of the forecast period, says the IDC.
Worldwide spending on infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will grow at a faster rate than SaaS with five-year CAGRs of 27% and 30.6%, respectively.
"Over the past several years, the software industry has been shifting to a cloud-first (SaaS) development and deployment model. By 2018, most software vendors will have fully shifted to a SaaS/PaaS code base," says Frank Gens, senior vice-president and chief analyst at IDC.
"This means that many enterprise software customers, as they reach their next major software upgrade decisions, will be offered SaaS as the preferred option. Put together, new solutions born on the cloud and traditional solutions migrating to the cloud will steadily pull more customers and their data to the cloud," he notes.
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