While overall technology spending in the enterprise is only set to rise about 0.6 percent this year, Gartner Inc. expects demand for cloud services to increase 16.5 percent during the same period, or more than 25 times faster. The newly released forecast puts the market on track to surpass the symbolic $200 billion mark by the next calendar reset ten months from now, although not all of the spending will go to the likes of Amazon.com Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc.

The research firm’s numbers also factor in the revenue of online advertising providers, which are expected to account for a hefty $90.3 billion chunk of the total 2016 tally. And another $42.6 billion will be spent on so-called “business process services”, a category that includes every outsourced offering delivered via the web under an on-demand business model. Gartner predicts that the remainder will be split entirely among the four core segments of the public cloud, with the lion’s share going to the software-as-a-service world.

Organizations will spend $37.7 million on managed applications and productivity tools this year, a 20.3 percent jump from 2015. While impressive, that figure represents just over half of the anticipated growth in the infrastructure-as-a-service category, which came out second on Gartner’s list with a revenue outlook of $22.4 billion. Trailing behind as a distant third is the ecosystem of management automation and security providers that formed around the two segments in recent years, where $6.2 billion is set to be generated this year, or nearly 25 percent more than during the previous 12 months.

Last but not least is the platform-as-a-service segment, which will see the Salesforce.com-owned Heroku, the open-source Cloud Foundry and their countless lesser-known contenders compete for an estimated $4.6 billion in global sales. That represents a respectable 21.1 percent annual increase, although if previous years are anything to go, at least some consolidation is still likely to occur among the smaller players.

Photo via Geralt