A recent study by GigaOM Research finds that the cloud computing market is on pace to grow by 126 percent in 2014, Business 2 Community has reported. That includes a growth in the software-as-a-services market of 119 percent, and growth in the infrastructure-as-a-service market of 122 percent.

The news isn’t all good in the IaaS space for vendors, however, as Gartner recently predicted that one-in-four IaaS vendors will disappear by the end of the year, due to feverish competition.

Another major trend: "as the cloud matures, larger established businesses and enterprises have started to get on board public and private cloud platforms," the article notes. "Many larger businesses prefer to build their own solutions rather than using off-the-peg SaaS platforms, which results in a tipping of the growth balance away from the SaaS provider, which saw much larger initial growth, and towards the IaaS platforms that better provide for the need of enterprise clients."

In the meantime, others are mourning the expected passing of the platform-as-a-service market.

As noted this week in Network World, "cloud’s platform-as-a-service market hasn’t even grown up yet, but already some people are saying its doomed."

The article cites a recent study by the 451 Research Group entitled, "Is PaaS becoming just a feature of IaaS?" in which the author predicts that the IaaS market will be absorbed by IaaS and SaaS providers.

"Already IaaS and SaaS vendors have rolled out PaaS-like features for customers to build applications on their services," Network World notes. "Meanwhile, there is a market of independent PaaS vendors taking a plethora of approaches to serve the needs of application developers. But, reports like (451 Research senior analyst Jay) Lyman’s cast a shadow of doubt over just what the future of this industry holds."

Two things are remarkable about this. First there is the idea that it’s going to be worth so much, of course, but second the idea that UCaaS has actually become a thing in its own right so quickly. UC Insight is a little concerned about the amount of perfectly innocent businesses that are acquiring this ‘aaS’ suffix to turn them into revenue streams for providers but that’s another debate.

The term seems to be pretty much another way of saying people are moving to the cloud, as cost savings emerge but also a more flexible way of working becomes available.

Another area helped by the increasing importance of UCaaS, UC in the cloud or whatever we want to call it, is the chance smaller businesses have to take part in this growing area. Paying for the need and requirement rather than constantly carrying an overhead to cover the maximum possible need makes it more affordable to businesses that couldn’t have used it before, particularly in an economy in which there has been the need to scale down as well as up on occasion.

MarketsandMarkets says the UCaaS Market will grow from $13.10 billion in 2014 to $23.34 billion by 2019. This represents a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.2% from 2014 to 2019 which is steady but – one hopes – not unsustainable.