Big data drives 47% growth for top 50 public cloud companies

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Big data analytics are driving rapid growth for public cloud computing vendors with revenues for the top 50 public cloud providers shooting up 47% in the fourth quarter last year to $6.2 billion, according to Technology Business Review Inc. The New Hampshire-based financial and technical research firm says the broader public cloud market, beyond just the top 50 vendors, grew 25% from the fourth quarter of 2012 to the fourth quarter of 2013 to be a $15.1 billion market.

Those figures are in line with estimates from firms such as IDC, which said the cloud was a $47 billion annual industry last year and will grow to be a $107 billion annual industry by 2017. Perhaps the most surprising result in TBR’s latest figures are the extent to which public cloud providers are using big data to drive their own operations, get new customers and expand product portfolios…

TBR’s research encapsulates companies across the IaaS, SaaS and PaaS markets and vendors from each of these categories are using big data to drive their operations. On the SaaS side, companies like Salesforce.com and Box – which is attempting to turn more into an enterprise collaboration tool than just simply a cloud storage feature – are using big data analytics tools to track how customers are using their products. “Public cloud vendors can leverage usage statistics such as seats deployed, data stored, modules used, how frequent usage is, and how people are accessing the tools, i.e mobile vs desktop,” wrote TBR senior cloud analyst Jillian Mirandi in an email. Doing so allows these providers to quickly resolve customer issues, mitigate potential renewal threats, and use the data to upsell to existing customers and cross-sell to new companies that are similar to their existing customers…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/news/2014/041414-big-data-cloud-280665.html

Subscribe to the CloudCow bi-monthly newsletter @ http://eepurl.com/smZeb