According to a newly released forecast by the International Data Corporation (IDC), Public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market is expected to generate revenues of over $14bn in 2017. The opportunities for monetizing public PaaS functionality are high in light of the advances being made in social, mobile, and real-time contextual activities.
The (PaaS) global market is set to leap from US$3.8 billion in 2012 as companies look to cut infrastructure costs and speed up application development.
IDC breaks PaaS into a number of sub-segments, including APaaS (application platform as a service), DPaaS (database platform as a service), cloud-based test and IPaaS (integration platform as a service).
Companies are flocking to public PaaS because doing so can lower IT infrastructure spending while providing high availability and scale. It's also possible to create applications more quickly because PaaS makes it easier to perform functional and load testing, as well as to deploy software, according to the report.
"Additionally, IDC research indicates that by 2017, public PaaS will account for more than 10% of overall application development and deployment revenue, with strong growth occurring in every region of the world, especially in Asia/Pacific (including Japan)," Mahowald added.
The report revealed that the real-time interactions with customers and partners are expected to increase the need for better application deployment services.
"One of the biggest unknowns related to public PaaS is its potential impact on IT staff. Because public PaaS improves developer productivity by a factor of two or more, what happens to the developer workforce? Do enterprises make more use of IT or elect to take some or all of the benefit in terms of reducing the developer workforce?"