News & Updates

1 in 5 Top Companies Building Cloud Service Ecosystems

By Gretchen Dukowitz / February 15, 2015

Much of the research on cloud services focuses on the size of the public cloud market or SMB adoption, and for good reason. The industry is massive, with spending predicted to hit $127 billion by 2018, sparking a growth rate that is six times greater than the IT sector overall.

At AppDirect, we’ve taken a unique approach to looking at the cloud service commerce industry. For the second year in a row, we evaluated how the biggest companies in the U.S.—the Fortune 500—are influencing the distribution and development of cloud services and applications.

Some of the changes we found were incremental, with increases in some areas and slight declines in others, but there was also a lot of surprising information we didn’t expect to find. For example, the fact that nearly one in five Fortune 100 companies offer APIs or a formal developer program to encourage ISVs to create software that complements their core offerings. This is an encouraging sign, given that ecosystems like these are critical to driving cloud service adoption and revenue.

Here are some other insights we found:

• 74 percent of the Fortune 500 offers cloud services or applications of some kind, up 13 percent from 2013.
• 18 percent of Fortune 100 companies offer third-party cloud services or applications.
• Of the companies that offer marketplaces, only 63 percent offer true app store functionalities (single sign-on, billing, etc.) while 37 percent do not.
• As a whole, more than half of cloud service or application marketplaces, 53 percent, are targeted to businesses only.

To see more findings, check out our Fortune 500 App Report infographic. It gives an overview of our findings in an easy-to-read format.

Gretchen Dukowitz is the Content Marketing Editor at AppDirect