ERP and CRM systems dominate business cloud computing spending: IDC

Enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management services make up a majority of cloud spending worldwide, according to figures from IDC.

The figures, compiled from IDC’s Worldwide Semi-annual Public Cloud Services Tracker, show the worldwide market for cloud services hit $US45.7 billion ($A48.7b) during 2013. Of that total, $US10.78 billion (24%) was spent on ERP systems and $US8.13 billion (18%) was spent on CRM.

ERP systems (such as SAP, Oracle or Microsoft Dynamics AX) are integrated whole-of-business management applications integrating accounting, payroll, manufacturing, supply chain management and project management. Meanwhile, CRM software (such as Salesforce) manages customer relationships.

Other major cloud-based service categories included servers at $US3.981 billion or 9% of the market, collaborative applications (such as Office 365) at $US3.37 billion, and security software at $US2.922 billion.

The strength of ERP and CRM spending meant the Software-as-a-Service model accounted for 72% of the market, with Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service making up 14% each.

Salesforce, ADP and Intuit dominate the SaaS market; Amazon, Salesforce, Microsoft, GXS and Google are the largest PaaS competitors; while Amazon, RackSpace and IBM lead the IaaS market.