Global Platform as a Service (PaaS) revenues will reach $1.2 billion in 2012 (up from $900 million in 2011) Gartner reports as the market hosts an increasingly intense battle between cloud vendors and products.
The analyst forecasts WW PaaS revenues will total $1.5bn in 2013 before reaching $2.9bn by 2016.
The PaaS category covers the gamut of application infrastructure services, including applications platforms as a service (aPaaS) and integration platforms as a service (iPaaS), as well as specialist cloud-based middleware services such as database platform as a service, business process management platform as a service, messaging as a service and others.
Customers can either subscribe to a PaaS or buy cloud-enabled infrastructure products and build a PaaS for private or public cloud use.
Gartner says Infrastructure (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are the most mature and established cloud-based technologies, while PaaS is the least evolved. Thus the PaaS competitive landscape remains in flux, with traditional vendors facing competition from new large players and any number of specialist PaaS players.
The largest PaaS segment, aPaaS, accounts for 34.4% of global 2012 PaaS spending. Cloud application life cycle management (ALM) services (almPaaS) follow with 12%, together with 11.6% for cloud BPM platform services (bpmPaaS) and 11.4% for iPaaS.
"The fundamental appeal of PaaS is the opportunity for ISVs (independent software vendors) and IT organisations to create new software solutions with minimal capital expense and without the hassle of provisioning and configuring the underlying infrastructure," Gartner remarks. "PaaS offers SMBs the chance to take advantage of some state of the art enabling technologies they otherwise could not afford. Finally, the popularity of SaaS also drives adoption of PaaS for customisation, extension and integration of the cloud-based applications."
Mature markets, including W. Europe, should lead in PaaS adoption-- combined the US, W. Europe and Mature Asia/Japan account for almost 90% of WW PaaS spending.
