Worldwide PaaS Revenue To Reach $1.2 Billion In 2012: Gartner

Worldwide platform as a service (PaaS) revenue is estimated to reach $1.2 billion by the end of 2012, up from $900 million in 2011, a latest Gartner report stated.

The growth in the market will be consistent throughout the next four years with worldwide PaaS revenue totaling 1.5 billion in 2013 and growing to $2.9 billion in 2016, according to the report.

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). It also includes 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. Users may subscribe to a cloud provider's PaaS or may buy a cloud-enabled application infrastructure product and build their own PaaS for private cloud (private PaaS) or public cloud consumption.

"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," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. "For this reason, PaaS is where the battle between vendors and products is set to intensify the most.”

According to Gartner, the largest segments within the PaaS market are cloud application platform services (aPaaS), accounting for 34.4 percent of total PaaS spending in 2012; cloud application life cycle management (ALM) services (almPaaS) at 12 percent; cloud BPM platform services (bpmPaaS) at 11.6 percent and cloud integration services (iPaaS) at 11.4 percent.

The report projected that the potential spending in PaaS technologies is an average of $360 million per year from 2011 through 2016.

Regardless of ongoing economic uncertainties, mature economies, which are also the most mature IT markets, such as the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, are on the forefront of PaaS adoption.

PaaS spending globally is relatively small, and it is almost entirely generated by the U.S., with 42 percent of the market, followed by Western Europe and Mature Asia/Pacific. All mature economies combined account for almost 90 percent of worldwide PaaS spending.

Emerging markets are currently only marginally investing in PaaS, but this trend is expected to change as PaaS matures as a technology and the vendor landscape consolidates around fewer mainstream players that have the capability to service wider geographies, said the report.