According to Gartner, SaaS and IaaS revenues will grow by 18.5% in 2017.

Rather than on-device, Gartner expects software revenues to reach US$58.6billion by the end of the year, fuelled by cloud providers offering many apps and extra-value products as-a-service.

Sid Nag, research director at Gartner, said to itpro: “Final data for 2016 shows that SaaS revenue was far greater in 2016 than expected, reaching US$48.2 billion.

“SaaS is also growing faster in 2017 than previously forecast, leading to a significant uplift in the entire public cloud revenue forecast.”

“Strategic adoption of platform as a service (PaaS) offerings is also outperforming previous expectations, as enterprise-scale organisations are increasingly confident that PaaS will be their primary form of application development platform in the future.

“This accounts for the remainder of the increase in this iteration of Gartner’s public cloud services revenue forecast.”

Nag also noted between now and 2021, Gartner expects a 28% increase.

Written by Leah Alger