It’s an exciting time to be a cloud seller as the application landscape continues to grow into the cloud. Intricately data shows that 250% more applications were deployed to the cloud last year—that’s 7 million apps and up from the 2 million deployed the previous year.

Large IaaS and PaaS vendors, like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, attract millions of businesses looking to deploy applications quickly and flexibly. But there is also significant opportunity for smaller cloud hosting vendors within different verticals and specializations.

In Intricately’s latest Application Deployment Report, we offer visibility into trends shaping the application deployment landscape. This report helps cloud sellers think broadly about what shapes a business’s approach to application deployment, but more importantly, how sales and marketing can use granular data to create more targeted messages in their prospecting.

What Trends are Shaping the Application Deployment Landscape?

By and large, companies of all sizes are adopting the cloud at a faster pace than data centers or hybrid solutions.

Between 2013 and 2019, the number of cloud-based applications grew nearly ten times. IaaS and PaaS solutions are the main drivers here, as they allow businesses to deploy new applications and launch them globally within a few minutes.

Without significant CapEx costs, barriers to entry are significantly lower than they were in the past. Infrastructure can also scale with new businesses, and in terms of consumption, companies can pay-as-they-go.

Looking at the data, it’s clear which companies are driving application launches to the cloud.

SMBs and startups saw incredible growth in application deployment to the cloud over the last seven years. In 2013, there were about 1.1 million applications deployed to the cloud among startups. By 2019, that number had climbed to 15 million.

This number continues to grow — presenting cloud providers with substantial opportunity. And the opportunity isn’t just for cloud providers. Data centers and hybrid solutions remain necessary for applications as they scale and evolve in maturity. As applications gain more traffic, businesses may choose to shift the application to an on-premise data center for financial reasons.

Data center deployment has increased among all business sizes since 2013, but most significantly among SMBs. Data center adoption is growing more among SMBs than mid-market or enterprise companies, because: 1) SMBs are more numerous than larger companies and 2) larger companies have pre-existing infrastructure in place and more complex needs.

SMBs are still three times as likely to choose the cloud over data centers. But as SMBs grow in maturity, many will shift their applications and workloads to data centers.

Learn more about the impact of application maturity on configuration by reading the full report.

Use Intricately For Transparency Into Target Account Application Behavior

In 2020, businesses of all sizes deployed more applications to the cloud, while data centers and hybrid solutions were still utilized by many mid-sized and enterprise-level applications.

As more businesses launch applications to the cloud, sales and marketing teams can use application data to better understand their ideal customers and create more compelling messages and programs. IT sellers can use application data to understand when a buyer would benefit from switching vendors, need an additional provider, or is up for a contract renewal.

For more insights on application deployment, like a regional breakdown and the top cloud hosting vendors by application count, download the full report. Intricately can give you a view into how the applications of more than 7 million companies are being built, deployed, operated, and scaled -- plus the best opportunities within this space for cloud sellers.

Download the 2021 Application Deployment Landscape Report