Gartner says cloud services market in Middle East and Northern Africa region to surpass $378m in 2012

Business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS) is on pace to be the largest segment, accounting for about 52% of the total Middle East and Northern Africa market in 2012, while cloud management and security services represents the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market and is expected to grow 41.4% in 2012.

"The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace," said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. "The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and then prioritizing investments in line with the opportunities."

BPaaS is the largest segment primarily because of the inclusion of cloud advertising as a subsegment. BPaaS is forecast to grow to $195.1m in 2012, up from $191.7m in 2011. In 2011, human resources BPaaS services represented about 19% of the total public cloud services market, making it the biggest identifiable subsegment in the forecast. By 2016, cloud advertising will become the largest segment accounting for about 22% of total public cloud services spending in the Middle East and Northern Africa region.

Software as a service (SaaS) is the next-largest segment and is forecast to grow to $74.6m in 2012, while IaaS is forecast to grow from $35m in 2011 to $47.5m in 2012. Growth in application infrastructure services (also known as platform as a service, or PaaS) will also be high, although it is a smaller market relative to the other segments. PaaS is strategic and considered to be a critical growth driver for other segments, including BPaaS and SaaS. The PaaS segment in the Middle East and Northern Africa region is forecast to grow to $15.8m in 2012.

Cloud management and security services constitute a new forecast segment comprising cloud security services, IT operations management (ITOM) and storage management (including backup and recovery services). The cloud management and security services segment is forecast to grow to $45.5m in 2012.

Gartner analysts will examine key industry topics and provide additional insights at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, which will take place in Dubai March 5-7, 2013.