Technology research and business insight leader, Gartner has reported that worldwide revenue of cloud services will rise to more than $68.3 billion by the end of the year – that is an improvement of 16.6% from an already robust 2009.

According to Gartner, Cloud-computing will see a likely surge in services sales to more than $148 billion by 2014. Well, this is a telling sign that enterprise customers have grown to accept that the era of traditional hardware installations and on-premise software has come and gone.

Well, the ubiquity of smart-phones, the distributed workforce and the dire need to cut IT costs has really turned cloud computing into a standard operating procedure.

Earlier this month, Hewlitt Packard laid out its plans to slash more than 9,000 jobs over the course of the next three years in order to embrace cloud computing.

Gartner’s Ben Pring had this to say:

“We are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises and an explosion of supply-side activity as technology providers maneuver to exploit the growing commercial opportunity…The scale of application deployments is growing; multi-thousand-seat deals are increasingly common,” he added. “IT managers are thinking strategically about cloud service deployments; more-progressive enterprises are thinking through what their IT operations will look like in a world of increasing cloud service leverage. This was highly unusual a year ago.”

Pring continued:

“After many years of germination, most notably in the SaaS arena, the core ideas at the heart of cloud computing — such as pay for use, multi-tenancy and external services — appear to be resonating more strongly…The financial turbulence of the last 18 months has meant every organization has been scrutinizing every expenditure,” Pring said. “An IT solution that can deliver functionality less expensively and with more agility (remembering that time is money) is hard to ignore against this backdrop.”

Now, while there still are serious security issues which need to be resolved, more and more CIOs are giving cloud-based applications, security and storage options the benefit of the doubt when it comes to speeding IT deployments and substantially reducing operating expenses.

European and North American markets represent the largest markets from, and while other geographies around the world will certainly experience growth, the growth will not notably change the overall drift from the larger regions through the course of the next five years.

Pring said:

“We have not seen any evidence yet to support the often-touted hypothesis that smaller and/or developing countries will “leapfrog” Western markets — and come to represent a large proportion of the overall worldwide market — through their adoption of the Internet and cloud services…”