Cloud vendors added another zero to their combined revenues in the 12-month period ended September 2015 for an eye-watering total of $110 billion worldwide, according to a new market estimate from Synergy Research. The figure represents an impressive 28 percent improvement over the previous year that was predictably driven in large part by the rapidly growing demand for off-premise computing resources.

The infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service categories emerged as the primary beneficiaries of the trend with a combined revenue gain of 51 percent. That increase in demand was reflected by the most recent quarterly earnings report of market leader Amazon Inc., which saw income from its public cloud jump a massive 78 percent during the three months ended September 30 to over $2 billion. Overall, Synergy Research estimates that Jeff Bezos’ firm and its rivals in the segment generated $20 billion in revenue between October 2014 and September 2015.

Software-as-as-service providers such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. added another $27 billion to the cash pile during that period, according to the report, while much of the rest of the $110 million market revenue came from organizations’ internal cloud projects. The category spans both the efforts of traditional enterprises to copy the success of their off-premise vendors behind the firewall and the vendors themselves, which are likewise buying more infrastructure to keep up with growing customer demand.

So much so, in fact, that Synergy estimates cloud providers  increased technology spending at a much faster pace than their peers on the other end of the supply equation during the surveyed period. As a result, the private and hybrid cloud segment came out at second place in terms of overall growth with a 45 percent total revenue gain through September 2015. Every other part of the market that the firm studied for the report grew in the double digits as well, an encouraging sign for vendors going into 2016. 

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