According to the new forecast, the professional services, communications and media, and discrete and process manufacturing markets will generate the most public IT cloud services revenue. The professional services market, in particular, is the sweet spot of public IT cloud services partly due to the multitude of information-dependent midsize companies that will adopt software-as-a-service.

The services and distribution sector - which includes vertical markets such as retail, wholesale, professional services, consumer and recreational services, and transportation - contributes the largest share of US public IT cloud services revenue. Currently a $3 billion market, IDC estimates that it will more than double to $8.5 billion by 2014.

Applications account for more than half of revenues in 2009, but over the forecast period, applications will drop to one-third of the market revenue and infrastructure software will grow to 22 percent of all revenue.

Verticals that are highly regulated or with serious privacy and security data concerns, such as government, banking, and healthcare, will be limited in their spending on public cloud IT services beyond certain applications such as email, messaging, and collaboration.

Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, a program manager in vertical markets research group at IDC, and one of the primary authors of the study, said: “This research breaks new ground by sizing US Public IT Cloud services revenue by 18 vertical markets. This forecast will help suppliers to quantify the market opportunities on a granular level.

“While the healthcare vertical will represent less than five percent of this market's total revenue in 2014, it will experience a high compound annual growth rate of nearly 23 percent through the forecast period. Despite serious concerns about privacy, current healthcare reform and the rise of connected healthcare will lead providers to the public cloud for specific functions such as collaboration applications.”

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