Cloud Computing Services to Swell to $150B Market by 2020: Verizon

As further evidence of growing adoption trends, the total market for cloud computing services is expected to swell to $150 billion by 2020, according to officials with Verizon (News - Alert) Communications Inc., the second-largest U.S. phone company.

Cloud computing allows businesses to store data and programs on offsite computers and access them via the Internet. Verizon officials seem pretty confident that the company, which has invested more than $2 billion on cloud technology, will have a big share of the market.

“We think we’ll have a pretty big share of that,” Kerry Bailey, group president of Verizon unit Terremark Worldwide (News - Alert), said during a press meeting in Amsterdam today, Bloomberg (News - Alert) reported. “A lot of companies are moving into this space.”

Verizon said the company expects that the total market for cloud computing services will grow to $150 billion by 2020 from about $10 billion now. The market for cloud services will grow by $90 billion in the next four years, according to Bailey’s forecast.

According to Bloomberg, Bailey said that Verizon has spent “well over $2 billion” on cloud technology this year, after acquiring information-technology services company Terremark and CloudSwitch, a provider of software.

In August, Verizon announced it acquired cloud services software developer CloudSwitch, a move the carrier hopes will provide an edge in the vaunted hybrid cloud market. And in April, Verizon completed its acquisition of Miami-based Terremark, helping fuel overall Verizon growth by accelerating the company’s strategy to provide “everything-as-a-service” to business and government customers globally, company officials said.

Customers of both companies have access to Verizon’s and Terremark’s respective IT services and cloud portfolios, including virtualization, managed hosting, application management, storage and cloud computing services.

Earlier this year, analysts with Forrester (News - Alert) Research predicted the global market for cloud computing will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020. Those figures include revenues for public cloud, virtual private cloud and private cloud services.