Gartner: Cloud spending to skyrocket in 2009

IT shops are turning to the cloud even faster than expected, at least according to Gartner, and other firms had already predicted hearty adoption throughout the next few years.

Gartner on Thursday released a report estimating that worldwide cloud services revenue will not only surpass $56.3 billion this year but, perhaps more telling, will surge to just more than $150 billion in 2013.

[ InfoWorld's Tom Sullivan interviewed author Nick Carr about the many ways cloud computing will disrupt IT. ]

The analyst house said that traditional IT services moving to the cloud will constitute a large segment of the growth, as will substantial new businesses.

Cloud-based business processes are the largest portion of the cloud services market, which includes advertising, e-commerce, human resources, and payments processing, and Gartner forecast 19.8 percent growth in the segment to $46.6 billion this year. Advertising-supported services, such as those provided by Google and emulated by Microsoft, Yahoo, and others, account for 60 percent of overall cloud services and will remain the largest component through 2013, Gartner said.

The notion that the current economic downturn -- and the tighter IT budgets it has brought -- makes hosted applications and services all the more appealing has been brewing for months now. InfoWorld reported last fall that the downturn will spark cloud computing growth. And IDC has predicted strong growth of the cloud, saying last week that a major shift to cloud IT services is inevitable.

But cloud computing is not the only technology expected to continue growing in this downturn. On Wednesday, market researcher TNS Global published the results of a spending survey laced with a little hope. The report predicted continued growth in storage hardware and health care IT.