Application containers will be a $2.7bn market by 2020

Containers represent a small but high-growth segment of the Cloud-Enabling Technologies market.

Tuesday, 10th January 2017 Posted 7 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The application container market will grow from $762m in 2016 to $2.7bn by 2020, according to 451 Research’s latest Cloud-Enabling Technologies Market Monitor report. Despite making up a relatively small portion of the overall Cloud-Enabling Technologies (CET) market, application containers will see the fastest growth compared to other segments, with an estimated CAGR of 40% through 2020.

451 Research estimates that the entire CET market, which includes virtualisation, containers, Private PaaS, and other automation and management software, is worth approximately $23.1bn in 2017. It is expected to grow at a 15% CAGR to $39.6bn at year-end 2020.

The application container market can be compared to the OpenStack market since both are based on open source software and have participation from startups and established vendors. Both markets also saw relatively rapid growth during a short amount of time in the enterprise. But based on the number of vendors currently participating and yet to emerge, containers may have a broader impact on the market than OpenStack, which was valued by 451 Research at $1.8bn in 2016 and is expected to grow to $5.8bn at a CAGR of 35% by year-end 2020. 451 Research analysts believe enterprise adoption of containers and market maturity appears to be happening more rapidly than OpenStack and other adjacent trends, such as PaaS and DevOps.