A new report, European Cloud & Hosting Providers, the Top 250 2015, produced by IT Europa shows a steadily growing business, with much of the growth coming through the independent companies rather than larger publicly-listed firms.
The total revenues for companies in the report rose by just 1.5% in 2014 over the previous year, but reached €92bn in Europe.
The top application and solution areas being hosted were Software as a Service (SaaS) (54% of companies), security (50%), web hosting (45.6%), networks (42.4%), Data Centre Space Rental/Co-location (32%), email hosting (30.8%), Server Rental/Virtual/Dedicated Servers (27.2%), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (26.8%), Platform as a Service (PaaS) (25.6%).
The high figures for security are to be expected given the rapid developments in this area. Platform as a Service (PaaS) was surprisingly strong at 25.6%; telephony/VoIP/Voice at 25.2% is expected to evolve further as unified communications continues to grow, comments IT Europa's news team.
The big firms stayed at the top, with IBM Global Services EMEA, Capgemini SA, Microsoft EMEA, HP Enterprise Services EMEA and BT Global Services staying ahead of global leader AWS in Europe.
Of the 250 companies profiled, there were 177 Independent companies, 52 Subsidiaries, 17 Public companies (traded on stock exchanges) and four parent companies.
The best performers were the Independents with revenues increase of 8% between 2013 and 2014.
Companies from 24 European countries were included in the report, with the largest geographic markets covered in terms of companies profiled being: UK (143 companies), Germany (23), Netherlands (18) and France (12). The largest geographic markets in terms of revenue are UK ($33.79bn), France ($30.06bn).