• by Jess Nelson , January 5, 2017

The cloud services market grew 25% to rake in nearly $150 billion in annual revenue, according to newly released data from Synergy Research Group.

The analyst firm released a market landscape growth report on Tuesday that tracked cloud growth from fourth-quarter 2015 to third-quarter 2016, culminating in $148 billion by September 2016.

“We tagged 2015 as the year when cloud became mainstream and I’d say that 2016 is the year that cloud started to dominate many IT market segments,” states Jeremy Duke, founder and chief analyst at Synergy Research Group. “Major barriers to cloud adoption are now almost a thing of the past, especially on the public cloud side. Cloud technologies are now generating massive revenues for technology vendors and cloud service providers and yet there are still many years of strong growth ahead.”

Cloud infrastructure services, particularly Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud solutions, were the fastest-growing segment over the year analyzed. IaaS and PaaS services grew 53% annually, according to the report, led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Hosted private cloud services, such as IBM and Rackspace, grew 35% year-over-year.

Enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud services were not far behind, with an annual growth rate of 34% according to Synergy Research Group. Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud’s 35% annual growth rate is eerily similar so it’s not surprising that Salesforce was listed as a leader in Forrester’s most recent wave report on Enterprise Marketing Software Suites. Salesforce was highlighted by Forrester alongside Oracle and Adobe, the latter ranking as the strongest performer.

Adobe's Marketing Cloud grew 20% year-over-year, according to the company's most recent fiscal report, generating $1.63 billion in annual revenue.