Platform as a service market is expected to rise from $900m in 2011 to reach $2.9bn in 2016, according to a report by Garter.
According to the report, the market will witness steady growth during the period reaching $1.2bn in 2012 and $1.5bn in 2013.
The market 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 middleware application offered as a cloud service.
Cloud application platform services (aPaaS) will be the largest segments within the PaaS market, accounting for 34.4% of the total PaaS spending in 2012 while cloud application life cycle management (ALM) services (almPaaS) will account for 12% of the spending.
Cloud BPM platform services (bpmPaaS) will account for 11.6%; and cloud integration services (iPaaS) will account 11.4%.
According to Gartner forecast, about $360m per year will be spent on PaaS technologies from 2011 through 2016.
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Gartner research director Fabrizio Biscotti said 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.
"For this reason, PaaS is where the battle between vendors and products is set to intensify the most," Biscotti said.
"It comes as no surprise that the PaaS competitive landscape is still in flux, with traditional application infrastructure vendors facing competition from new large players moving into the market, and myriad specialized PaaS pure players cutting into their slice of profits."
The report said that 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.
Gartner analyst Yefim Natis said that the fundamental appeal of PaaS is the opportunity for ISVs (independent software vendors) and IT organisations to create new software appkliation with minimal capital expense and without the hassle of provisioning and configuring the underlying infrastructure.
"Too many SMBs (small or midsize businesses), in addition, PaaS offers the chance to take advantage of some state of the art enabling technologies, they otherwise could not afford," Natis said.
"Finally, the popularity of SaaS also drives adoption of PaaS for customization, extension and integration of the cloud-based applications."
During the period mature market like US, Western Europe and Japan will take a lead in PaaS adoption.
Currently, 42% of the revenue is generated from the US which was followed by Western Europe and Mature Asia/Pacific and about 90% of the spending come from mature economies.
