This IDC study presents the worldwide and U.S. cloud professional services forecast for 2012–2016 and includes a segmentation of the cloud professional services opportunity by foundation market, macroregion, and cloud category (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). This study summarizes market trends and analyzes what has changed in the market in the past year since the previous forecast was released.

"Compared with last year's cloud professional services forecast, IDC predicts higher spending during 2011 and 2012 but lower spending over the remaining forecast period," says Gard Little, research director, IT Consulting and System Integration Research. "IDC believes increased spending is due not only to acceleration in the adoption of cloud services but also to the buildout of cloud application platforms and infrastructure."