PaaS To Be The Next Battleground For Cloud Service Providers

Belying its nascence, the Asia Pacific platform as a service (PaaS) market is attracting considerable interest from businesses due to the flexibility it brings to application development and software as a service (SaaS). As most software available from the cloud is standardised, enterprises are looking to leverage PaaS offerings as it will be the only stack where a service provider can create differentiation.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Asia-Pacific Platform as a Service Market 2011, finds that the market earned revenues of $43.2 million in 2010 and estimates this to reach $523.0 million in 2016.

The high level of flexibility and the ability to reduce costs while developing, testing, and deploying new applications is creating a strong case for PaaS’ adoption.

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“The growing developer community, with an increasing number of small/part-time developers, is also creating a strong opportunity for the market,” said Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Mayank Kapoor. “PaaS provides them access to a scalable IT infrastructure and the tools required to develop and test their applications, on a pay-as-you-go basis.”

Enterprises have begun to recognise the benefits and need for cloud computing and are taking steps to enable it in their organisations. However, as PaaS is still only a fledgling concept, its lack of regulation and standardisation has restrained adoption among enterprises in the highly regulated sectors.

The differences in the choice of platforms, such as Java, Ruby, or others, are hindering porting applications and data between PaaS vendors and/or to on-premise. Therefore, openness and integration with other platforms and mobile devices will be crucial in the future. Constant technical innovations will ensure that the PaaS market evolves and sheds its embryonic tag.

As the market matures and reaches a critical scale over the next couple of years, the number of participants will increase. The influx of competitors can also be attributed to enterprises’ demand for local datacentre presence of cloud service providers. Today, an increasing number of companies are demanding that IT teams serve as internal service providers.

“There is increasing pressure amongst both internal IT teams and third party service providers to streamline operations through automation and intelligent management,” noted Kapoor. “Cloud can be one of the frontline options to meet this demand and eventually, will bode well for PaaS.”