Cloud services to hit £46bn in 2010

US accounts for 60 per cent of cloud service revenue

Cloud computing revenue to hit £100bn in 2014

Analyst Gartner says that global revenue from cloud services is set to top £46bn this year, up 16.6 per cent year on year.

Some 60 per cent of this revenue will come from North America and 23.8 per cent will come from Western Europe.

Gartner Research vice president Nick Pring said that the scale of application deployments is also growing with multi-thousand-seat deals increasingly common.

“IT managers are thinking strategically about cloud service deployments, with most progressive organisations considering using the service. This was highly unusual a year ago,” added Pring.

Gartner is also predicting strong growth through 2014, with worldwide cloud services revenue projected to reach £100bn.

"After many years of germination, notably in the SaaS arena, cloud computing’s core ideas - such as pay for use, multi-tenancy and external services - appear to be resonating more strongly," said Pring.

This can be explained by macroeconomic factors said Pring, with the financial turbulence of the last 18 months causing every organisation to scrutinise every piece of expenditure.

“An IT solution that can deliver functionality less expensively and with more agility (remembering that time is money) is hard to ignore against this backdrop," added Pring.