<p>And you thought this whole cloud thing was just a bunch of hooey.</p><p>The public cloud services market will grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion worldwide, according to a new report from the market research firm Gartner. That includes an expected 47.3% increase in infrastructure as a service or IaaS including cloud compute, storage and print services to $9 billion. The IaaS market rose 42.4% in 2012.</p><p>Gartner says cloud advertising continues to be the largest segment of the cloud services market, or about 48% of the total market in 2012. Gartner expects that for the 2013-2016 period, $677 billion will be spent on cloud services overall, $310 billion of that on cloud-based advertising.</p><p>According to Gartner, the second-largest segment is business process services, which accounted for 28% of the cloud market in 2012, followed by software as a service at 14.7%, cloud system infrastructure at 5.5%, cloud management and security services at 2.8% and cloud application infrastructure also called platform as a service at 1%.</p><p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2013/02/28/public-cloud-mkt-to-grow-18-5-in-13-to-131b-gartner-says/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://cloudplatforms.cbronline.com/news/global-public-cloud-services-market-to-reach-131bn-in-2013-report">Global public cloud services market to reach $ 131bn in 2013: report</a> (Computer Business Review)</p><p><a href="http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/global-public-cloud-services-mkt-to-be-131-bn-in-2013-gartner-113022800421_1.html">Global public cloud services mkt to be $ 131 bn in 2013: Gartner</a> (Business Standard)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dug7T8TgtqnL7IMg7voX9mvUjjg8M&ned=us">9 additional articles.</a></p>