Current Analysis: PaaS to Play a Critical Role in Enterprise Development

IBM and Oracle PaaS releases signal industry readiness for platform services

Sterling, VA, USA, December 12, 2012 – Current Analysis, the market leader in continuous, tactical competitive intelligence for the telecommunications and information technology markets, announced today that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will be a key component of enterprises’ application platform deployments in 2013, especially now that the industry’s leading middleware vendors, IBM and Oracle, have entered the space. Businesses are anxious to build on today’s social, mobile, and cloud-borne applications, and they will look to new PaaS offerings by traditional application platform players to modernize their development practices, according to a new Market Advisory Report titled “PaaS Will Play a Critical Role in Enterprise Development.”

“Practically overnight, PaaS is on the radar of enterprise infrastructure architects looking to evolve their businesses by taking advantage of cloud-based devops to speed application development, where necessary software and supporting servers are made available in moments rather than weeks or months,” said Jerry Caron, Senior Vice President of Analysis at Current Analysis.

The report, written by Charlotte Dunlap, Senior Analyst, Application Platforms at Current Analysis, offers the industry a view of the current state of the PaaS market, including the pillars that make up a platform service, profiles of the industry's leading PaaS offerings, and near-term drivers of PaaS. Other key findings include:

• Innovative and high-profile cloud startup Heroku helped spur interest in PaaS by illustrating the advantage of outsourcing middleware tools so that developers can focus their efforts on writing application code rather than assembling OSs, databases, messaging, and other servers needed to support application deployment.
• Developers need agile platform services that let them quickly respond to internal requests, including the creation and ongoing management of new application development as product offerings, marketing programs, customer needs, etc. change.
• Mobile computing will become a major driving force behind deploying PaaS, because mobile application deployments require modern infrastructures that support varying traffic.
• Customers will be faced with rectifying open source versus best-of-breed, so while open source providers such as Red Hat and VMware will continue to emphasize lightweight, affordable platform services, IBM and Oracle will work to attract customers through innovation and their ability to provide developers with best-of-breed performance, security, support, and management capabilities.
• PaaS providers will increasingly partner with managed service providers and ISVs, which will offer their own platform services on top of vendors’ PaaS offerings to support modern app development and provide an important supportive role in the distribution of new types of cloud services.

“A broader base of application developers will suddenly have access to best-of-breed middleware by leading vendors through platform services, without having to make a big capital investment,’’ stated Ms. Dunlap. “The most recent PaaS unveilings by IBM and Oracle send a powerful message to enterprises that PaaS will play an important role in modernizing application development, driven by the need for middleware on demand and auto-scaling.”

For more information on this topic and other application platform research and analysis, please go to http://www.currentanalysis.com/s/824.asp.

Media Contact:

Amee Singh
Sr. Director, Marketing Communications
pr@currentanalysis.com 

About Current Analysis

Current Analysis (http://www.currentanalysis.com) is the only provider of real-time, in-depth tactical competitive intelligence, analysis, and advice. The company has been helping leading telecommunications, information technology and business software companies improve their competitive intelligence, differentiate themselves in the market, and win more business.  For more than 15 years, sales teams, product managers, marketing professionals, and executives have relied on Current Analysis as a trusted partner to improve their ability to anticipate and quickly take action on market opportunities and competitive threats.  The company serves more than 35,000 professionals at over 1,600 global enterprises.

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