PaaS revenue to reach US$1.8B in 2015
Worldwide revenues for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will continue to grow through to 2015, with the battle among vendors set to intensify, said Gartner.
In a Wednesday release, the analyst firm reported that the worldwide revenue for PaaS is set to reach US$1.8 billion in 2015. This year's revenue is expected to hit US$707.4 million, up from US$512.4 million in 2010, it added.
Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, listed infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), PaaS and software-as-a-service (SaaS) as the three technological aspects of cloud computing. PaaS was described as the "least developed aspect" of cloud services while SaaS emerged as the most developed.
Competition among vendors in the PaaS space, the analyst predicted, will increase in the coming years.
Elaborating, the research firm said few providers currently have a comprehensive and integrated PaaS offering. Moreover, the fragmentation will be "impossible to deal with" as users and service providers adopt large-scale, business-critical applications that require simultaneous use of multiple PaaS capabilities including user experience, application servers, database management systems (DBMSs), security and messaging, it noted.
As a result, there will be a rapid consolidation of PaaS products into suites and provide users with well-integrated and optimized platform services either from the same or different vendors, said Gartner. These services will also be co-located in the same data center to provide appropriate levels of performance, security, manageability and availability, it added.
According to the report, the development will take place in phases. Around 2013, PaaS functionalities will consolidate around specific usage scenarios which will pave the way for integrated comprehensive PaaS offerings to emerge from 2015 and beyond, Gartner forecasted.
"Clearly, from the attention given to this segment by the industry's giants, it is likely that they are viewing PaaS as a strategic undertaking as much as an incremental market opportunity," said Biscotti.
"As PaaS suites mature, they may emerge as critical enabling technologies for many cloud-based businesses," he said. "At the same time, as companies adopt these platforms, the providers of the platforms will likely leverage them to expand their ecosystem, leverage their natively developed application services (SaaS) or extend their on-premise solutions."
In a July ZDNet Asia report, analysts noted that the uneven maturity of PaaS platforms was hindering companies and independent software vendors from focusing their efforts on a specific platform.