The cloud market has evolved rapidly over the past few years. Platform, integration, and specialization remain crucial to expansion. Analysts predict the following trends in 2013:

As the cloud market matures, niche vendors continue to be consolidated; it is expected that SaaS acquisitions would exceed $25 billion over the next 20 months, a 50% increase from the past 20 months

As hybrid deployments and heterogeneous landscapes proliferate, integration will continue to dominate the cloud discussions. Analysts predict the iPaaS market will grow nearly 35% in 2013

Industry-specific PaaS offerings will continue to emerge in 2013. We’ve already witnessed pockets of these, such as the NYSE trading community platform, Panoptix from Johnson Controls, and BaseSpace platform from Illumina. It is interesting to note that these offerings are built by industry-specific players rather than IT vendors. It is expected that the “generic” (horizontal) PaaS market will become commoditized

Cloud is also making its way into IT organizations within the enterprises. CIOs’ adoption of a “cloud first” strategy will double to 70% by 2016 as CIOs define architecture standards and service management processes. Skill gaps will be a critical issue in enabling this transformation. As PaaS gains popularity, it will be embraced as the next generation platform by CIOs. IT organizations will play a key role in providing cloud brokerage services in the future months

Mid-market companies will also leverage more cloud services in 2013. Service providers are expected to play a major role in providing specific, targeted solutions to midmarket companies. Private cloud engagements in particular will gain traction among SMBs in the U.S. – more than 25% of midmarket firms will leverage this in 2013

Cloud security will be another significant growth pillar. While North America will continue to have the largest revenue share, analysts predict emerging markets and Eastern Europe to have the fastest growth

Check out SAP slideshare presentation to learn more about the 2013 trends.