Gartner Report: PaaS Market Leaders for Enterprise Applications

Gartner Agency presented its PaaS (Platform as a Service) market report for enterprise applications (aPaaS). Gartner analyzed the current market offerings for deploying corporate solutions in a cloud environment within PaaS and presented the findings in the classic “magic quadrant” for the company.



Gartner rated the largest players in the aPaaS market: Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Google, Engine Yard, SAP, IBM, Red Hat, and others. A detailed description of the benefits and cautions for each solution is available in the report . The well-known Amazon provider was not included in the report, as it mainly offers IaaS infrastructure, but the report covers aPaaS platforms built on the basis of Amazon services.
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As a result of the analysis, Salesforce.com and Microsoft (Windows Azure platform) were named aPaaS market leaders. For Windows Azure, Gartner provided the following description:

The vendor approach (Microsoft) focuses on the “cloud at the core of everything” principle and is accompanied by frequent updates and aggressive development of new features and improvements. A far-reaching goal is to offer a comprehensive infrastructure for the development of .NET applications in the form of PaaS services. PaaS capabilities in Windows Azure go beyond aPaaS and include SQL Database (dbPaaS), messaging services (Windows Azure Service Bus), distributed cache (Windows Azure Cache) and iPaaS functionality (Windows Azure BizTalk Services). The platform also presents the new mobile services Windows Azure Mobile Services - a cloud backend for mobile applications as a service that offers support for many mobile platforms. Microsoft's presence in other cloud environments (for example, SaaS through Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365, including SharePoint Online) also adds capabilities to the cloud vendor strategy.

The main advantages of the Microsoft platform are the following characteristics:

• Windows application developers and those familiar with .NET feel comfortable in their Windows Azure environment compatible with their habits and knowledge. This provides an opportunity to attract millions of developers who may consider Windows Azure as their native platform;
• Microsoft focuses on providing equal opportunities for public and private clouds , which means that corporate developers can use Windows Azure with the confidence that the cloud platform is well integrated into their existing environment and that, if necessary, they can move the application from the cloud to its power;
• Microsoft has a comprehensive vision for the platform , which includes support for integration services, in-memory computing, messaging and other functions presented as services in addition to the aPaaS core services. Plus, Windows Azure services include a fast-growing IaaS platform, which allows developers to use the required level of abstraction and combine PaaS and IaaS approaches within the same task;
• Windows Azure, along with .NET, supports Node.js, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and other application development platforms (including Linux in IaaS), allowing developers with development experience on platforms other than Microsoft to use the Windows Azure environment.

Gartner also highlights a number of caveats for the Microsoft platform:

• The Microsoft offer contains insufficient tool support for rapid application development based on models in the form of GUI tools (despite the Visual Studio toolkit). The xRM capabilities available in the company's products (part of Dynamics CRM) could be used with Windows Azure, but the vendor does not actively promote them;
• Microsoft faces uncertainty due to a change in the company's top management and due to intersections with the core business related to Office, which may distract the company's efforts. The development of multiple areas IaaS, PaaS and SaaS also blurs the focus of the company;
• Providing equal opportunities for developers in the public cloud (Windows Azure) and private environment (Windows Server) is still at work, and marketing promises are different from the realities of current products.

Details and descriptions of other aPaaS service providers can be found in the Gartner report .