Platform-as-a-Service: 2012 Results

Short review

Recently, Engine Yard conducted a study of the PaaS market (“platform as a service”) in order to identify factors affecting the use of PaaS technology by companies. Special attention was paid to how this cloud solution is used by software developers. According to the results of the study, three conclusions were made concerning the implementation of PaaS.

• Applications deployed on PaaS are innovative and customer-oriented. In the cloud, companies more often deploy “software as a service” (SaaS), mobile, commercial, and social applications than traditional ERP and CRM systems and supply chain management applications.
• PaaS is widely used: almost 60% of respondents said they already use PaaS or plan to implement it within the next year.

Factors affecting the decision to implement PaaS can be divided into three categories:

• First order: improving functional performance
• Second order: improving applications
• Third order: cost reduction

What is Platform-as-a-Service (PAAS)?

Platform as a service ”(PaaS) is a category of cloud processing services, which include a platform for developing applications as a service. This model provides that the cloud service provider provides the customer with programming languages, application development environments, libraries, services, and tools with which the end user develops and deploys applications. The provider also manages and controls the cloud infrastructure used by the customer, including the network, servers, operating systems, and storage devices, while the end user controls the deployed applications and, in some cases, the configuration settings of the environment in which the applications are located.
Thus, PaaS automates the configuration, deployment and management of applications, allowing the end user to concentrate on the actual application development and innovation.

Study

The annual PaaS market survey, conducted by Engine Yard, serves as a barometer of the factors leading to the introduction of PaaS in organizations of any size. This study allows you to gather invaluable information, identifying what the company's emphasis is in striving to maximize the use of cloud technologies for gaining competitive advantage and reducing costs.

About respondents

In the graph above, we see that the respondents were mostly technical specialists (technical management + application developers - 56.6%). Non-technical companies (represented by information technology directors and general directors) and executive staff (19.4% and 20.9%, respectively) were also largely represented.
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Almost half of respondents (46%) are employees of application development companies and web studios. The remaining respondents were employees of companies of various sizes.

About the applications of the respondents

During the survey, respondents were asked to rate the importance of the applications deployed on their sites. The purpose of these questions was to find out how critical, in their opinion, these applications are. As can be seen from the materials on the next page, the majority of respondents believe that their applications are of critical importance or are simply extremely important for their business. How this compares with PaaS implementation in these companies will be shown in one of the following graphs.



Respondents indicate that the development of their applications is carried out mainly by the company's own programmers or by hired contractors.



When asked what programming languages ​​their web applications are written in, respondents gave very different answers. The following languages ​​were mainly used when working with PaaS: Javascript, Java, Ruby and PHP.



When asked whether their web applications are innovative, the majority of respondents answered that they agree or fully agree with this statement.



Respondents have a good idea of ​​what a “platform as a service” is: 88% of respondents said they are familiar with the term.

Regarding the implementation of PaaS, companies that already use PaaS or plan to implement it during the year amounted to about 60%, while companies that do not intend to implement PaaS within the next year - 40% (“there are no plans to introduce years "+" no plans for implementation + not interested + I can not give an answer ").



Although the use of PaaS has many advantages, if we measure that the respondents consider “very important” (orange) and add the results to the “second in importance” (blue) advantage of PaaS, there are three groups:

Operational objectives:	Objectives associated with the use of:	Objectives associated with the use of:
Scalability (85.1%)	Allow the company to concentrate on its core business (75.4%)	Increase the professional knowledge of your employees (54.3%)
Accessibility Improvement / High Availability (78.8%)	Free up time for innovative work (75.0%)	Elasticity (66.7%)
Optimization of operating activities (77.2%)	Increase uptime (75.0%)	Reduced capital costs (66.8%)
Average = 80.4%	Average = 75.1%	Reduced staff costs (62.5%)
		Average = 62.6%

One of the previous research questions showed that respondents rated their applications deployed on PaaS as being critical for business. This explains why the “operational goals” were so highly rated: companies are turning to cloud technologies in the hope of increasing the versatility and availability of their applications.
Respondents using PaaS apply it to customer-centric applications: “software as a service” (Saas), mobile technologies, commerce, social services, and combinations of the above categories.

Results

Despite the fact that there is a large amount of information on the topic of cloud technologies, both truthful and false, there is considerable awareness of PaaS on the market. Most companies are adopting cloud technologies to launch more innovative customer-oriented applications, such as “software as a service” (Saas), mobile applications, online commerce and social services, while doing this in a number of different languages. While cost reduction is one of the reasons for implementing PaaS, the desire to improve operational readiness, functionality, and uptime is becoming increasingly important for respondents.