Following my sizing and forecast for cloud services published yesterday, I wanted to expand on the regional growth stats. The rapidly falling value of almost all local currencies against the $US is making market planning very difficult at the moment, as many of you know only too well.
In the Figure I show the quarterly growth of revenues from cloud services (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS combined) in the Americas, Asia Pacific and EMEA. For the latter 2 regions I’ve shown growth in current $US (as per my previous sizing) and in local currency (¥ and €).
The discrepancy is very clear – Asia Pacific grew only 10% in Q2 in $US, but by 30% when measured in Yen, while the gap was even greater in EMEA: 6% v 32%. These currency issues affect every international business, but have an added significance for cloud services, which are typically charged on a ‘pay-per-use’ basis. American cloud service providers are getting less revenue in $US from their international customers, which is only partially offset by the cheaper costs (in $US accounting) of building international data centres.