Cloud, as one of the substantial transformative forces, is impacting all areas of IT supply, composition, and consumption and provides the basis for many of the big data, mobile, and social solutions. In fact, the IDC (www.idc.com) research group predicts the number of new cloud-based solutions will triple in the next four to five years. 

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, says IDC. With the huge increase in the number and diversity of services available in the market, organizations across the industries will shift steadily toward cloud-first strategies to enable digital transformation.

The IDC study provides a vertical forecast by 20 industries for the United States and worldwide for 3 public cloud computing technologies — software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service — and 2 primary software markets for SaaS — applications and system infrastructure software — and 1 primary software market for PaaS — application development and deployment.
Key findings from the report include:

° IDC predicts that the public cloud computing will reach almost $70 billion in 2015 worldwide, with the top five verticals (discrete manufacturing, banking, professional services, process manufacturing, and retail) accounting for approximately 45% of the total spend for the market.

° The major opportunities for cloud within verticals come from the development of intelligent industry solutions, which are built on top of a new platform that includes cloud as well as big data and analytics, mobile, and social.

° Those IT suppliers that showcase the long-term benefits and the true value of the cloud as a platform in a given vertical (e.g., efficiency gains in business processes and improvement in customer acquisition/customer experience) will be most successful.

° The ease of purchasing cloud-based solutions has helped transfer buying power from IT to functional lines of business like marketing, finance, and operations.

° Security and regulatory remains the biggest barrier for cloud adoption across industries like government and financial services, while loss of perceived control over IT assets and massive legacy systems are also stumbling blocks for using cloud.

"The technological innovations and enabling capabilities unleashed by cloud have fostered new opportunities across the industries," says Eileen Smith, program manager, IDC Global Technology and Research Group. "As a result, it is necessary for both technology vendors and buyers to recognize the industry drivers and barriers of cloud deployment, to understand the business transformation brought by cloud, and to act upon the changes that will shape business and technology strategy in the coming years."

IDC asserts that cloud services will remain the essential foundation of the IT industry's 3rd Platform of 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. IDC predicts that there will be more industry-specific cloud services platforms and marketplaces run by leaders in each industry seeking to attract communities of thousands of innovators to create valuable new services.  

Smith concludes, "We have already seen such platforms and innovation communities in place in retail, financial services, media, and other industries. This will reshape not only how companies operate their IT but also how they compete in their own industry. Technology suppliers will continue to see significant demand for their industry-specific solutions. It is important for these suppliers to develop strong customer-partner relationships with cloud/platform players to seize new opportunities."