Gartner Says PaaS Set To Come of Age, Will Enjoy Multi-Year Growth 
A recent Gartner report finds the PaaS (platform as a service) market is ready to take off on a multi-year growth surge. The report says investments from vendors and venture firms is growing, all major software firms will soon have a PaaS play and cloud customers are seeing the benefits.
A recent Gartner report finds the PaaS (platform as a service) market is ready to take off on a multi-year growth surge. The report says investments from vendors and venture firms is growing, all major software firms will soon have a PaaS play and cloud customers are seeing the benefits.
“Users and vendors of enterprise IT software solutions that are not yet engaged with PaaS must begin building expertise in PaaS or face tough challenges from competitors in the coming years,” said Yefim Natis, said vice president at Gartner and an author of the report in a statement.
The Gartner report, entitled “ PaaS 2012: Tactical Risks and Strategic Rewards” found that 2011 was “a turning point’ for the PaaS market. “The fact that more vendors are investing in PaaS is an endorsement that PaaS is a good alternative to the traditional middleware deployments,” the report said in part.
Over the next few years, PaaS products are likely to quickly evolve into “major pieces of the cloud computing market.” Natis added. In fact, he compared PaaS’ future growth prospects to the tremendous growth IT has seen in foundational SOA and middleware products (including ESBs) over the past decade.
Despite the picture of a bright future, Natis conceded that the PaaS sector is still missing some key ingredients to success. The PaaS sector doesn’t yet have well-established leaders, Best Practices, use cases or dedicated standards, he said. These missing PaaS pieces may also be responsible for some of the uncertainty and risk over PaaS felt by many IT decision makers.
Nonetheless, Natis is optimistic that 2012 will be the beginning of the beginning of a PaaS period, as those missing pieces will soon be in place. His report may accurately summarize the tricky equations that IT needs to calculate about PaaS – and how to get onto the PaaS bandwagon without jumping too soon -- or waiting too long.
“The tension between the short-term risk and the long-term strategic imperative of PaaS will define the key developments in the PaaS market during the next two to three years,” Natis said.
To help IT adjust their timing just right for their business, Natis’ report also presents a timeline for PaaS’ growing maturity. By late this year, Natis expects several new PaaS offerings to be generally available. A year on (late 2013), he further predicts that all major software vendors will have launched PaaS offerings. The Pass sector really heats up after that until by 2016, the PaaS competition could become white hot enough to spur new programming models, new standards and new leaders in the market.
