Platform as a Service (PaaS)

In the past 12 – 18 months, the buzz about cloud computing has evolved to the market wondering how they can benefit from the services that the cloud provides. Cloud computing covers extensive technological variations such as: infrastructure as a service, software as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and the private cloud. Each offers their own computing solutions. According to the research firm Gartner, Platform as a Service (PaaS) which is a service of cloud computing that gives businesses the ability to develop and run applications in a hosted virtual environment, is expected to grow this year with the main software vendors offering new or expanded platform as a service (PaaS) products.

It is predicted that the next 12 months is going to be the period when more businesses start to implement cloud computing, and according to Gartner, “PaaS is expected to be an important element of cloud adoption.” Analysts at Gartner are saying, “Users can expect a wave of innovation and hype.”  Analysts at Gartner also predict “that the present PaaS products, will consolidate over the next few years into a few major application infrastructure service suites” They are predicting that “by 2015 most enterprises will have a hybrid environment where internal and external services are combined, with PaaS playing an important role in this integration.”

Platform as a Service, which is a collection of services that are hosted by vendors whereby businesses have the ability to develop and host applications, is becoming so popular for enterprise because of its greater flexibility, lower costs, ease of implementation, and ease of management. Companies such as Microsoft describes its Windows Azure technology as a platform as a service because it has an integrated software layer on which applications can be developed using PHP, Java, XML, and .NET, to name just a few, can run. As well, new technologies in platform as a service will allow users to have instances of storage and processing and will also include an operating and development environment for their applications that have been built on various programming languages.

Infrastructure as a Service in the public and private cloud will continue to be an important area, but PaaS will become more predominant and relevant area in 2011. Cloud technologies and services will be evolving and will be adopted by more businesses in 2011 due to the cloud's ability to make a large contribution to the computing resources that enterprise need.