While platform-as-a-service solutions have served as a middle ground between IaaS and SaaS, they may be carving their own place within the business technology ecosystem. According to a recent report from MarketsandMarkets, PaaS will likely be worth $6.94 billion by 2018. Analysts noted that this is likely due to service providers expanding their portfolios to include this delivery model across their public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
"This trend has been adopted by most of the traditional cloud computing and IT solution providers in the market like Amazon, Google, IBM, etc. Also many small players specializing in providing PaaS solutions have emerged and made the market so dynamic and competitive," the report stated. "This trend has benefited most of the application users and has increased the demand for PaaS on various sectors"
The report highlighted North America as the biggest PaaS market, where growing interest in enterprise application development makes it an attractive cloud model. Developers value the scalability and agility that cloud infrastructure provides as this technology model lowers time to deployment and often reduces the cost of building enterprise programs.
CenturyLink's Richard Seroter recently wrote a Forbes article in which he predicted PaaS would likely evolve beyond being an isolated solution. Instead, vendors are likely to begin offering it as a standard part of their cloud services. This will also likely pave the way for integration platforms to become a standard component of cloud solutions. Particularly as businesses address the challenges associated with hybrid and multi-cloud environments, demand for integration is likely to rise.
