Business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS) is the largest segment in the cloud services market, as it accounted for approximately 38 percent of the total Middle East and Northern Africa market in 2012. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) will continue as the high-growth sectors of the cloud service market through 2016. Cloud management and security services will also exhibit strong growth through 2016.

"Cloud services spending continues to outpace other parts of the IT marketplace," said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner.

"Worldwide, spending on cloud services will grow 17.7 percent through 2016. In the Middle East and North Africa region, growth is expected to be even higher, around 20.2 percent. Although there are some variations between cloud services segments, overall the outlook is very positive."

Within the region, some of the highest growth will be in the SaaS segment, where cloud-based office suites and enterprise resource planning solutions will grow rapidly. Growth is SaaS will be supported by strong growth in cloud application infrastructure services, or PaaS.

Overall, the PaaS marketplace will exceed $46m by 2016 to support a SaaS marketplace of $211m that same year.

Source: Procurement Leaders