An interesting if brief note from the analysts at Gartner this week: according to their forecasts, almost half of today’s platform as a service (PaaS) service offerings are cloud-only, with a $20 billion (£15.02bn) market revenue by the end of this year.
The analyst firm’s landscape details more than 550 PaaS offerings from 360 vendors across 21 market segments. 48% of these offerings are cloud-only, with 90% only operating within a single PaaS market segment. In terms of the overall market, the move to $20bn this year will go up to $34 billion by 2022.
These figures make for interesting reading when looking through the record books. As far back as 2012, Gartner said PaaS market revenue would hit almost $3bn by 2016. Things have accelerated since then, although as part of a wider market acceleration. Gartner figures from April last year predicted the overall public cloud market would overtake the $300bn mark by 2021 with a whopping 21% growth in 2018 alone. PaaS comprised only 8% of the total public cloud market however.
Naturally, the nature of what the PaaS market comprises is changing. In November 2013, Laurent Lachal, then a senior cloud computing analyst at Ovum, said the market will ‘remain confused’ as PaaS evolved in the coming two to five years. “PaaS offerings will mature and expand the depth and breadth of their features,” he wrote at the time. “For example, as part of the expansion of the scope of their ecosystem services, in the next two years PaaS offerings will increasingly provide not only business-level services but also application-level ecosystem services.”
According to Gartner’s latest focus, the latest abstraction for platform services and applications are blockchain, digital experience, serverless, and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Although many organisations anticipate a long-term retention of on-premises computing, the vendors of nearly half of the cloud platform offerings bet on the prevailing growth of cloud deployments and chose the more modern and more efficient cloud-only delivery of their capabilities,” said Yefim Natis, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
“Cloud computing is one of the key disruptive forces in IT markets that is getting mainstream trust.”
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