Gartner Says 2011 Will Be the Year of Platform as a Service

Top enterprise software vendors, as well as large cloud specialists, will launch new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings in 2011, according to Gartner, an independent analysis firm.

The year will be the year of Platform as a Service. Leading vendors will deliver strongly expanded PaaS service offerings and cloud-enabled application infrastructure products for enterprises.

“By the end of 2011, the battle for leadership in PaaS and the key PaaS segments will engulf the software industry,” said Yefim Natis, vice president and analyst at Gartner (News - Alert), in a statement.

“Early consolidation of specialized 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,” Natis added.

PaaS is the cloud technology architecture that intermediates between the underlying system infrastructure (operating systems, networks, virtualization, storage and the like) and overlaying application software.

The PaaS technology services include functionality of application containers, application development tools, database management systems, integration brokers, portals, business process management and many others.

According to Gartner, in the next three years, PaaS specialist-subset offerings will consolidate to a few major application infrastructure service suites. In the longer time, full-scale PaaS offerings will emerge.

The adoption of PaaS in organizations will not lead to a wholesale transition to cloud computing in the next five years. It will be an extension of the use patterns of on-premises application infrastructures to hybrid computing models.

The next five years will see the now-fragmented and uncertain space of cloud application infrastructure experiencing rapid growth through technical and business innovation. Large vendors will grow through in-house development, partnerships and acquisitions, while small vendors will grow through partnerships and specialization.

In November 2010, analyst firm 451 Market Monitor predicted it expects the cloud computing marketplace to reach $16.7 billion in revenue by 2013 from $8.7 billion in 2010, registering a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24 percent.