INSIGHT ARTICLE  |  November 11, 2021

The TMT industry continues to play a critical role in keeping people connected as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. Businesses are relying more and more on services provided by tech and telecom companies as large numbers of workers shift to remote work. Consumers have also relied more on TMT companies for connection and entertainment. As we learn to work and play in new ways during the pandemic, the TMT industry has caught hold of the pandemic tailwinds, which will take cloud spending to new all-time highs in 2022. Despite the pandemic, spending on cloud solutions remains an area of strength for the technology sector, according to the International Data Corp.:

Projected global spending on infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is $89.5 billion in 2021, is expected to eclipse $100 billion for the first time in 2022 and is on pace to reach $186 billion by 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate of 26%. Amazon continues to be the leader in this space and commands over 40% of the market, but its growth and overall market share have slowed relative to some of its competitors, such as Microsoft and Google.

In 2021, IDC estimates that $54 billion will be spent globally within the platform as a service (PaaS) market. The pandemic has slowed the PaaS estimated growth rate to 19% this year, compared to the 28% and 41% growth experienced in 2020 and 2019, respectively. Growth rate estimates increase in future years, with spending projected to reach $100 billion in 2024. This year’s temporary dip in growth is expected to reverse in the coming year, with 2022 PaaS spending predicted to grow by 29%, reaching $69 billion.

The global software as a service (SaaS) market is worth approximately $205 billion today, and spending on SaaS represents nearly 60% of all cloud spending. After an estimated SaaS market growth decline to 14% in 2021, that rate is expected to more than double in 2022, to approximately 32%, according to IDC. There are many ways for SaaS companies to make money, and companies targeting a horizontal market by selling across industries are growing about 12% faster than companies focusing on a specific vertical or niche industry (29.4% growth vs. 26.1% growth, respectively), according to SaaS Capital. The top two categories for SaaS application spending in 2022 are expected to be customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERM), with $63 billion and $54 billion in anticipated sales, respectively, according to IDC. While not representing the most significant amount of spending today, collaborative platforms such as conferencing and team applications are expected to grow the fastest in 2022, at a 20% rate, says the IDC.