While the public cloud revenue market in India exhibits solid growth in 2018, the growth rate is expected to flatten, which is indicative of a maturing market," said Sid Nag, research director at Gartner.

In 2018, Gartner estimates the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud market will be infrastructure as a service (IaaS). IaaS in India is forecast to total US$1 billion, an increase of 46 percent from 2017 (see Table 1). This growth is being driven by organizations refraining from pursuing data center build-outs and consolidation among data center vendors.

"While IaaS enables efficiencies and cost benefits, organizations need to be cautious about IaaS providers potentially gaining unchecked influence over customers and the market," said Mr. Nag. "In response to multicloud adoption trends, organizations in India are also increasingly demanding a simpler way to move workloads, applications and data, across cloud providers' IaaS offerings without penalties."

In regions such as India, pricing will be a major factor in organizations' decision making and selection of public cloud providers. "This means that some providers will be at risk if they fail to align their pricing," Mr. Nag added.

Software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest segment of the public cloud market in India, with revenue expected to reach US$932 million in 2018, an increase of 34 percent year over year.

"Organizations continue the move toward applications and workloads to the cloud locally, as opposed to running them on-premises. Today, SaaS users are increasingly demanding more purpose-built offerings engineered to deliver specific business outcomes," said Mr. Nag.

Within the platform as a service (PaaS) category, database PaaS (dbPaaS) is set to be the fastest-growing segment over the next four years. The dbPaas segment is on pace to total US$32 million in 2018, an increase of 50 percent from 2017. Gartner expects the segment to reach almost US$113 million by 2022. This presents a great opportunity for hyperscale cloud providers to include dbPaaS in their service offerings to grow their user numbers.

The rapid growth of dbPaaS is indicative of organizations in India moving away from traditional on-premises, license-based database consumption models to cloud-based "as a service" models, which are generally more price-competitive.