Worldwide platform as a service (PaaS) revenue is on pace to reach $707.4m in 2011, up from $512.4 million in 2010, according to IT research firm Gartner.
Gartner added the market will experience consistent growth with worldwide PaaS revenue totalling $1.8bn in 2015.
Gartner analysts said PaaS offerings are likely to expand the application integration and middleware (AIM) market by bringing in a new range of organisations that otherwise would have been packaged application and office software users.
Gartner vice president Yefim Natis said when application infrastructure is deployed on-premises, organisations can take a best-of-breed approach and integrate all acquired components in their data centre.
"When middleware services are acquired in the cloud from different PaaS providers – the services remain in different data centers and resist optimised integration," Natis said.
"Mainstream users of PaaS services will likely look for providers that deliver comprehensive and integrated PaaS functionality suites – forcing the specialist offerings to consolidate."
Gartner analysts predict a rapid aggregation of PaaS offerings into suites of functionalities, providing users with well-integrated and optimised platform services (from the same or different suppliers), co-located in the same data centre to provide appropriate levels of performance, security, manageability and availability.
Initially, around 2013, PaaS functionalities will consolidate around specific usage scenarios, paving the way for integrated comprehensive PaaS offerings to emerge from 2015 and beyond.
"Clearly, from the attention given to this segment by the industry’s giants, it is likely that they are viewing PaaS as a strategic undertaking as much as an incremental market opportunity," said Biscotti.
"As PaaS suites mature, they may emerge as critical enabling technologies for many cloud-based businesses; at the same time, as companies adopt these platforms, the providers of the platforms will likely leverage them to expand their ecosystem, leverage their natively developed application services (SaaS) or extend their on-premises solutions."
