Is This the Year PaaS Goes Mainstream?

Is This the Year PaaS Goes Mainstream?
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Will 2012 be the year of platform as a service?

If you let the vendors tell it, 2011 was to be the year PaaS offerings began to coalesce and take off. And the major market research firms have been watching the space carefully, predicting consolidation and more and more investment in PaaS.

While many people are still unfamiliar with the concept of PaaS, Gartner has actually been tracking PaaS since 2007. In its latest report about the technology, the research firm said that PaaS revenue would rise about 38 percent from $512.4 million in 2010 to $707.4 million in 2011.

PaaS represents the on-ramp to the cloud in that it provides the linkage between application platforms and underlying cloud infrastructures, according to Forrester Research. Further, Forrester defines platform as a service as “a complete application platform for multitenant cloud environments that includes development tools, runtime, and administration and management tools and services” and adds that PaaS “combines an application platform with managed cloud infrastructure services.”

With more IT suppliers moving their offerings to the cloud and more enterprises adopting the cloud computing model for a number of reasons—fast, easy deployment, immediate access to resources, immediate scalability, at-your-request development and testing capability, and pay-as-you-go pricing—the cloud model continues to grow and offer a viable alternative to on-premise solutions.

“I think that PaaS is a foundation for a major transformation of how people build software,” said Dave West, an analyst with Forrester. “Imagine a world where business-type people, or at least business developer types, assemble their applications from a combination of PaaS and software as a service. This is particularly true for systems of engagement, with a strong focus on the consumption rather than the creation of information. It will be interesting to see how the PaaS vendors shake out in the next year.”

In many cases, PaaS is viewed as an alternative to middleware stacks offered by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and other software providers.

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