The PaaS market is filled with noise. "Platform as a Service" is surrounded with blind men around the elephant, each with their own definition PaaS. This is further compounded by the fact that the Application Platforms landscape is changing quickly as well. We keep hearing that "Developers" want control of the code, access to the nuts and bolts of the service they intend to consume. The same "Developers" seem to be adopting PaaS because of the tremendous speed and scale advantage. And the same "Developers" seem to be clamoring over the security and architectural compliance matters. There's even talk of developer cloud mutiny! There are use cases that are simplified to the usage of a Private PaaS, but that's only addressing the matter from a hosting and Data Control standpoint, beyond which the concern should be how the Platform Stack is built and provided to the developers. However, there's a context to every statement.

The definition of the PaaS and its use case is very different for a freelance developer,

v/s. ISV trying to build a SaaS App,

v/s. an SME business trying to leverage the agility of a ready-to-use Platform,

v/s. Rogue developers in Enterprises trying to get something done quickly,

v/s. ‘devops' trying to decide on a Platform for a set of Business Applications,

v/s. Enterprise IT trying to decide on a Platform across the business.

And that's where it's important to understand. That PaaS is not "one" single defined entity and has multiple flavors to it. Our Platform deals with Applications made for Enterprise Business use case. In this context, the decisions are driven by multiple factors, but are not an oversimplified "Control v/s Independence" kind of decisions that individual developers go through. We see strong use cases for a robust Enterprise Applications Platform that provides the IT the Agility to respond to business users and with a quality & robustness of stack that makes the platform an apple-to-apple choice between Build v/s Buy.

Gartner predicted that worldwide PaaS market will hit USD 1.5 billion by year-end, and we see the trend heating up as well. So, one advice for anyone assessing a PaaS buying decision would be to not get swayed by the market noise, but make an informed decision based on the use case, functional and architectural fitment, how the PaaS proposition fits your dev cycle, and of course the financial viability of the payment model. We see strong growth for Application PaaS ahead in 2013! Good times for developers, Good times for enterprises!