UK cloud market predicted to total £10.4bn by 2014

The value of the UK cloud market will more than double between now and 2014 from £2.4bn to £6.1bn, according to a report from analyst firm TechMarketView.

However, the report, called the 'UK Software and IT Services Market Forecast', argues that if the cloud market forecast was to include application provisioning (AP), it would increase from £5.8bn now to £10.4bn by 2014.

These forecasts would see cloud computing account for 15 per cent of the total UK software and information technology services market by 2014 (and 24 per cent with AP included).

TechMarketView foresees cloud adoption happening in three waves. The first wave will see the adoption of public computing for greenfield applications. The conversion of traditional datacentres to private clouds will be the second wave, and the migration of mission-critical legacy applications to public clouds will be the third.

It predicts that these will overlap, but the final wave will not peak until the middle of the decade.

The report says: "We expect that the public cloud market will grow much more rapidly than private cloud in the early years, as enterprises (especially SMEs) move ‘easy win' applications off premise.

"In contrast, private cloud implementations involve substantial investment in infrastructure and software installation and migration, and will therefore not move as fast.

"Beyond the forecast horizon we would expect public cloud growth to accelerate again as mission-critical legacy applications move to public cloud."