Gartner: PaaS set for takeoff in 2011

Market watcher predicts a swathe of new PaaS offerings from all the top enterprise vendors this year

2011 is set to be the year of platform-as-a-service (PaaS), according to market watcher Gartner.

It is predicting that all the top enterprise software vendors and cloud specialists will launch PaaS offerings this year, or deliver strongly expanded PaaS services and cloud-enabled application infrastructure offerings.

Today’s PaaS offerings come in more than a dozen specialised types, Gartner said, but it alleged that during the next three years, the variety of PaaS offerings will consolidate to just a handful of application infrastructure service suites, with more full-scale PaaS offerings emerging over time.

Yefim Natis, vice president at Gartner, said: "By the end of 2011, the battle for leadership in PaaS and the key PaaS segments will engulf the software industry."

Early consolidation of specialised PaaS offerings into PaaS suites will also be evident. “New vendors will enter the market through acquisitions or in-house development. Users can expect a wave of innovation and hype,” he said. “It will be harder to find a consistent message, standards or clear winning vendors.”

The analyst predicts that the adoption of PaaS in most midsize and large organisations will not lead to a wholesale transition to cloud computing during the next five years. Instead it will be an extension of the use patterns of on-premise application infrastructures.

Natis added: “The cloud computing era is just beginning, and the prevailing patterns, standards and best practices of cloud software engineering have not yet been established. This represents an opportunity for new software providers to build a leading presence in the software solutions market.

“It is also a major technical and business challenge to the established software vendors: to retain their leadership by extending into the new space without undermining their hard-earned strength in the dominant on-premise computing market.”

Gartner predicts that most organisations will have part of their ‘run the business’ software functionally executing in the cloud by 2015, using PaaS services or technologies directly or indirectly.