Gartner says the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market should be worth $1.2 billion this year, up from $900 million last year, and hit $1.5 billion next year on the way to $2.9 billion by 2016.
Its calculations include everything from Salesforce.com’s Force.com to discrete application infrastructure components, such as databases, messaging and what it calls “other functional types of middleware offered as a cloud service.”
Since the widgetry is less mature than IaaS or SaaS and more popular in mature economies – like the US which represents 42% of the market – Gartner says “PaaS is where the battle between vendors and products is set to intensify the most.”