The cloud services market in India will grow at close to 30% this year to about $550 mln, according to technology forecasting firm Gartner. 
The rate of forecast is three times the 10% growth that Nasscom has predicted for the domestic IT and BPO market in the year 2014-15.
Gartner’s forecast includes only public cloud services, or services that are provided by for several companies at the same time, instead of exclusive, or private, cloud services that are run for a single client.
Salesforce CRM is an example of a public cloud service.
Going by the Gartner’s estimate, public cloud accounts for about 1.6% of the total IT and BPO spending in India.
Spending on software as a service (SaaS) will total $218 million in 2014, growing 30.3 percent from 2013 through 2014, Gartner said.
SaaS is a subsection of cloud services, along with infrastructure and platform services.
Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2017, $4 billion will be spent on cloud services in India. SaaS is the largest overall cloud market segment, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS), totally $76 million in 2014 and business process as a service (BPaaS), totally $73 million over the same period.
“The market for public cloud services in India continues to expand at rates outpacing much of the rest of the world,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “Increased demand for the business benefits and cost efficiencies will drive growth uniformly across virtually all cloud market segments through 2017.”
BPaaS is expected to grow from $61.9 million in 2013 to $154 million in 2017. SaaS is expected to grow from $167 million in 2013 to $507 million in 2017, and IaaS is forecast to grow from $58 million in 2013 to $217 million in 2017.
The Indian market is expected to be one of the fastest growing countries in Gartner’s cloud forecast. IT spending on public cloud services in India is expected to reach $1.3 billion in 2017.