SAP plans to double cloud revenue in 2012, reach $2 billion in category revenue by 2015, and grow its cloud market share thirty-fold over the next five years.

Numbers to date confirm that SAP is delivering.

Read article by Optimal President Sam Sliman: SAP Flying High in the Cloud

The migration to the cloud will undoubtedly pick up steam in 2012 and beyond as a growing number of enterprises look to benefit from the lower cost, easily scalable and maintenance free world of cloud computing.

As the ‘everything-as-a-service’ trend continues, SAP aims to be a cloud leader, doubling its cloud computing market share this year, reaching $2 billion in category revenue by 2015, and growing it’s cloud market share thirty-fold over the next five years.

Here’s a rundown of some of the latest pundit predictions on how big and how fast the cloud will grow in the years ahead:

• The cloud market will surpass $17 billion in 2012 (CMI Research)
• Cloud services spending will exceed $23 billion in 2012, with 30% growth over 2011 (IDC)
• More than 80% of applications developed in 2012 will be cloud-based (IDC)
• CRM will be the largest SaaS market in 2012 (IDC)
• Cloud systems management will grow 62% in 2012 (IDC)
• Cloud-related companies will pump $20 billion annually into the economy, roughly translating to 472,000 new jobs over the next five years. (SAND Hill Group)
• More than half of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the cloud by 2016 (Gartner)
• More than 20% of organizations have already begun to store this data in hybrid clouds (Gartner)
• 80% of cloud services will include a global energy surcharge by 2015 (Gartner)
• Revenues in Amazon Web Services will exceed $1 billion in 2012 (IDC)
• According to a recent survey, 43% of IT leaders have cloud computing initiatives planned for 2012, a 12% increase over 2011 (Inavero Institute)
• The Retail (47%), Manufacturing (46%), Education (43%) and Government (41%) sectors had the highest percentage of survey respondents that have plans to implement cloud solutions in 2012 (Inavero Institute)
• 40% of IT leaders are actively researching the next phase in public cloud computing services and initiatives (CIO Magazine Tech Poll results for January 2012)
• Cloud business intelligence usage is expected to jump in the next one year as 47% of SMBs plan to shift to cloud from spreadsheets, a jump of 59% from 2011 (Techaisle)
• Sales of cloud-based SaaS applications will hit $17.3 billion in 2013, up 41% from an estimated $12.3 billion in 2011 (Gartner)
• About a third of cloud applications sales in 2011 were from CRM applications (Gartner)
• By 2016, 40% of enterprises will make proof of independent security testing a precondition for using any type of cloud service (Gartner)
• Public cloud computing services will fuel the IT industry for the next 25 years with growth forecast at 27.6%per year, becoming a $72.9 billion market by 2015. (IDC)
• Public cloud computing will account for 46% of all new growth in IT spending, most notably in applications, app development and deployment, infrastructure, storage and servers. Of this growth, the U.S. will represent 50% of all public cloud services spending in 2015. (IDC)
• The global public cloud market is growing from $25.5B in 2011 to $159.3B in 2020 (Forrester)
• The cloud computing market will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020 (Forrester)