Worldwide revenue for the public cloud services market totaled $545.8 billion in 2022, an increase of 22.9% over 2021, according to IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Public Cloud Services Tracker.
- Software as a Service – Applications (SaaS – Applications) continued to be the largest source of public cloud services revenue, accounting for more than 45% of the total in 2022.
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) was the second largest revenue category with 21.2% of the total.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service – System Infrastructure Software (SaaS – SIS) delivered 17.0% and 16.7% of overall revenue respectively.
"Given the economic challenges of the past year, it's easy to conclude that we are in a period where a focus on constraining new expenditures and optimizing the use of existing cloud assets will dominate CIOs' priorities and shape the fortunes of IT providers for the next several years. It's also a very wrong conclusion. The assessment and use of AI, triggered by generative AI, is starting to dominate the planning and long term investment agendas of businesses and cloud providers will play a significant role in the evaluation and adoption of AI enablement services," said Rick Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.
Some additional highlights from IDC:
- Spending with the leading providers of public cloud services further consolidated in 2022 with the combined revenue of the top 5 public cloud service providers – Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce Inc., Google, and Oracle – capturing more than 41% of the worldwide total and growing 27.3% year over year.
- With offerings in all four deployment categories, Microsoft remained in the top position in the overall public cloud services market with 16.8% share in 2022, followed by Amazon Web Services with 13.5% share.
- While the overall public cloud services market grew 22.9% year over year in 2022, revenue for foundational cloud services that support digital-first strategies saw revenue growth of 28.8%.
"Cloud providers are making significant investments in high-performance infrastructure," said Dave McCarthy, research vice president, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services. "This serves two purposes. First, it unlocks the next wave of migration for enterprise applications that have previously remained on-premises. Second, it creates the foundation for new AI software that can be quickly deployed at scale. In both cases, these investments are resulting in market growth opportunities."
