End-user spending on public cloud services in India will total $4.4 billion in 2021, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. As compared to 2020, end user spending on public cloud will grow 31.4% in 2021.

“Indian CIOs saw the benefits of cloud during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “To build business resilience and minimize the impact of continued disruptions, investing in cloud is unavoidable. India has experienced consistent double-digit growth in cloud spending over the last three years, the pandemic only expedited the shift.”

The continued trend of increased remote workers in 2021 will lead to an increase in spending on desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). These segments are forecast to grow 47.7% and 52.2%, respectively (see Table 1).

Table 1. India Public Cloud Services End-User Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

BPaaS = business process as a service; IaaS = infrastructure as a service; PaaS = platform as a service; SaaS = software as a service
Note: Totals may not add up due to rounding.

Source: Gartner (April 2021)

For the first time, spending on SaaS and cloud management and security services will experience double digit growth in India. “SaaS has been pivotal in supporting the sudden increase in the mobile workforce, as well as customers, in 2020. Learning from this , Indian CIOs will continue to build on the above trend as they move towards a composable business environment,” said Mr. Nag.

Within SaaS, customer experience and relationship management and content services will be the highest growing segments in 2021, forecast to grow 24.9% and 26.1%, respectively. In 2020, spending on e-mail and authoring declined 0.2%, however, this trend will reverse in 2021. E-mail and authoring is expected to grow 25.1% this year. With the increase in remote workers by organizations due to the pandemic, more business is being conducted using email and collaboration tools, which will drive the growth of these services.

Gartner clients can read more in the report "Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2019-2025, 1Q21 Update."  

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