The category of PaaS includes 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.
"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," Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner, said in a statement. "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."
The largest segments within the PaaS market are aPaaS, accounting for 34% of total PaaS spending in 2012; cloud application lifecycle management services (12%); cloud BPM platform services (11%); and cloud integration services (11%).
More than 70% 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, Gartner says.
Today, the largest AIM vendors have only marginal share of the PaaS market (lead by Microsoft and IBM), 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, the firm says.
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