Gartner reports PaaS revenues will reach $707.4M in 2011, up from $512.4M in 2010-- and should grow to reach $1.8 billion in 2015.
While early PaaS offerings primarily supported application server capability, the market now also covers integration, process management and portal and managed file transfers (MFTs) and is set to challenge both lower and (eventually) upper ends of portal, application server and business process management (BPM) markets.
The analyst forecasts PaaS offerings will also expand the application integration and middleware (AIM) markets, bringing in packaged application and office software using organisations.
However the PaaS market remains fragmented-- Gartner believes "such fragmentation will be impossible to deal with when users and service providers start to implement large-scale, business-critical applications requiring the simultaneous and in-concert use of multiple PaaS capabilities."
Gartner says PaaS functionalities will start consolidating around specific usage scenarios by 2013, before integrated comprehensive PaaS offerings start emerging from around 2015.
Such integrated PaaS offerings may prove to be "critical enabling technologies for many cloud-based businesses," while platform providers will leverage such companies into expanding their expanding their ecosystem through natively developed SaaS or on-premises solutions.
