The cloud computing market will reportedly reach $109 billion by the end of 2012, according to technology research firm Gartner, marking a near 20 percent increase from a year ago.

“The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner. “The key to taking advantage of this growth will be understanding the nuances of the opportunity within service segments and geographic regions, and then prioritizing investments in line with the opportunities.”

Business process services (BPaaS) continue to dominate the industry, making up 77 percent of the cloud market. Nearly half of BPaaS is made up of advertising.

Software as a service checked in at second, accounting for an estimated $14.4 billion, while the IaaS market was third at approximately $6.2 billion. However, IaaS and SaaS are expected to be nearly equal by 2016, according to the report.

North America continued to carry the cloud market in 2012, while Latin America and the Asia/Pacific region showed the highest growth rates. The Australian cloud market increased by 18.8 percent in 2012 to reach nearly $2.5 billion.

Europe continued to lag behind, although the market did show considerable signs of improvement with a 17 percent growth rate. In the U.K., the cloud market experienced a 27 percent increase for first-time users in the last 18 months, according to a Cloud Industry Forum survey.