In times like these when we keep being told how tight things are, how we must all make sacrifices and melt down the iron railings for ammunition again, kind of thing, it’s refreshing to see that there are still parts of the global ICT market that are in potentially very good health.

Step forward – you may not be that surprised by this – enterprise-class cloud services. Analysts Analysys Mason has just published extremely bullish forecasts for this exploding new category of ICT business. But interestingly, they do not expect fortunes to be made from any kind of Y2K technology stack refresh – it’s going to be in some unexpected areas that we will see the next wave of ICT industry dynamism, it seems.

First, the headline new news. In its view, this market will grow from $12.1bn this year to $35.6bn in 2015, a year-on-year growth rate of an amazing 43% in 2011 (though set to decrease to 13% over the next five years). Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will account for 70% of revenue in 2010, while 30% will be related to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), though the number crunchers expect this revenue split will change to become more like 40% in the timeframe covered.

Who will be delivering cloud? The firm sees the market of 2015 split sales-channel wise into IT partners (39% of the pie), regular vendor sales (36%), communications firms (23%) – and way, behind, managed service providers, at only 2%.

Sounds great – but the firm cautions that opportunity won’t come knocking on your door. "IT and application partners have a great opportunity, but ties to their legacy businesses could derail their aspirations in the cloud services market," warns a new study. "Failure to access the potential of these services will doom these partners to stagnant or declining revenue streams over the next five to seven years."

The firm even goes so far as to say recent equity analyst reports cite unwillingness to deal with cloud opportunities and threats by systems integrators as indicative of some reluctance to really engage with all the cloud may offer here.

It also tries to dissipate some of the usual cloud fog around who or what will be going cloud first. It doesn’t expect mass legacy apps cloud-ification by big enterprises, for a start; they are much more likely to "pick and choose cloud solutions for incremental technology projects". Instead, Analysys Mason’s principal analyst Steve Hilton instead thinks the sweet spot will be SMEs – "much more likely candidates for mass migration to the cloud."

If Hilton is right, then some cosy assumptions need to go out the window. An Accenture or an HP can do great things with enterprise clouds; but can they work their magic for the SME client? History suggests these sorts of companies are not very attuned to the smaller guy’s mindset – let’s be frank.

Instead, it will have to be a new sort of channel – a cloudy one – that meets this untapped need. That is great news for a part of the ICT ecosystem some people had genuine worries would cease to be relevant… if Hilton and his tam are right, of course.

What’s certain; cloud is coming. And someone will make money. They may not be the usual suspects, either.