Cloud carrier promises rich pickings for IT firms

China's market for enterprise IT is huge, but the share that goes to cloud computing is still comparatively small. Sales of cloud computing hardware and services amounted to about $4 billion in 2014, about 5 percent of China's total IT market. That's much lower than the 11 percent of global IT spending on the cloud.

We expect China's spending on the cloud to grow much faster than its overall IT spending, reaching as much as $20 billion by 2020 - an annual growth rate of 40 to 45 percent. Several recent announcements underscore the momentum toward the cloud in China.

Tencent announced in September that it would invest $1.57 billion in its cloud business, including in data centers in China, Hong Kong and North America. In July, Alibaba Group's cloud computing subsidiary, Aliyun, said it plans to invest $1 billion in cloud computing, including a data center it launched in Silicon Valley earlier this year and another planned on the east coast of the United States.