Will 2011 be marked as the year where dominance for the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market dominates the industry? That's what Gartner says in its special report examining the PaaS marketplace's key issues.
All leading enterprises software vendors and large cloud specialists will introduce-- or expand on-- their PaaS and cloud-based infrastructure offerings.
The analyst predicts today's PaaS specialist-subset offerings will consolidate into a few major infrastructure service suites within the next 3 years (as opposed to today's various specialised types); eventually, over a longer period, comprehensive full-scale PaaS offerings will emerge.
However large and midsize organisations won't transition entirely to cloud computing (at least not in the next 5 years)-- instead PaaS and on-premises application infrastructures will coexist as hybrid computing models.
Gartner says cloud application infrastructure (now fragmented and uncertain) will rapidly grow and mature, with large vendors growing through in-house development, partnerships and acquisitions and small vendors growing through partnerships and specialisation. Meanwhile both SaaS and PaaS services will mature enough (offering innovative technological and business models) to be increasingly attractive to customers.
Thus, the analyst concludes, most enterprises will have at least part of their run-the-business software executing in the cloud by 2015-- and most of such enterprises will have hybrid environments combining internal and external services.
Go Gartner Says 2011 Will Be the Year of Platform as a Service
