2011: the year of PaaS?

The leading enterprise software vendors, as well as large cloud specialists, will introduce new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings this year, making 2011 the year of PaaS, according to Gartner (NYSE: IT).

These vendors are expected to deliver new or strongly expanded PaaS service offerings and cloud-enabled application infrastructure products.

“By the end of 2011, the battle for leadership in PaaS and the key PaaS segments will engulf the software industry,” explains Yefim Natis, VP and analyst at Gartner. “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.
“It will be harder to find a consistent message, standards or clear winning vendors,” he adds.

PaaS refers to the layer of cloud technology architecture that contains all application infrastructure services, or middleware. It intermediates between the underlying system infrastructure (operating systems, networks, virtualisation, storage, etc.) and overlaying application software.

Today’s PaaS offerings come in a over a dozen of specialised types; however, during the next three years, the variety of PaaS specialist-subset offerings will consolidate to a few major application infrastructure service suites, and, over a longer time, comprehensive, full-scale PaaS offerings will emerge as well, says Gartner.

The firm believes that during the next five years, the adoption of PaaS in most midsize and large organisations will not lead to a wholesale transition to cloud computing. Instead, it will be an extension of the use patterns of on-premises application infrastructures to hybrid computing models where on-premises application infrastructures and PaaS will coexist, interoperate and integrate.

“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,” says Natis. “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-premises computing market.”