Worldwide Platform as a Service (PaaS) revenue is expected to reach $1.2 billion in 2012, up from $900 million in 2011. The market will experience consistent growth with worldwide PaaS revenue totalling 1.5 billion in 2013, and growing to $2.9 billion in 2016, a new Gartner study revealed.
Suites of application infrastructure services, such as application platforms as a service (aPaaS) and integration platforms as a service (iPaaS); as well as specialist application infrastructure services, such as database platform as a service, business process management platform as a service, messaging as a service and other functional types of middleware offered as a cloud service are involved in the category of PaaS. Users may subscribe to a cloud provider's PaaS or may buy a cloud-enabled application infrastructure product and build their own PaaS for private cloud (private PaaS) or public cloud consumption.
According to the Gartner prediction, the potential spending in PaaS technologies is an average of $360 million per year from 2011 through 2016. The largest segments within the PaaS market are cloud application platform services (aPaaS), accounting for 34.4 percent of total PaaS spending in 2012; cloud application life cycle management (ALM) services (almPaaS) at 12 percent; cloud BPM platform services (bpmPaaS) at 11.6 percent; and cloud integration services (iPaaS) at 11.4 percent.
Of all the cloud technological aspects, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) are the most mature and established from a competitive landscape perspective, while PaaS is the least evolved," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. "For this reason, PaaS is where the battle between vendors and products is set to intensify the most. It comes as no surprise that the PaaS competitive landscape is still in flux, with traditional application infrastructure vendors facing competition from new large players moving into the market, and myriad specialized PaaS pure players cutting into their slice of profits."
PaaS spending globally is relatively small, and it is almost entirely generated by the U.S., with 42 percent of the market, followed by Western Europe and Mature Asia/Pacific. All mature economies combined, account for almost 90 percent of worldwide PaaS spending.
More than 70 percent of PaaS functionality today can be referenced to an application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) capability, calling for AIM vendors to consider PaaS in their offerings or to have a strategy to address the needs of those clients looking at cloud for future deployments. Today, the largest AIM vendors have only marginal share of the PaaS market (lead by Microsoft and some IBM acquisitions), and this leaves the door open for more competitive landscape disruption over the next three years since many of the largest enterprise software vendors are on the cusp of entering the PaaS market with their own offerings.
