The State of PaaS: 2012

As a growing number of companies embrace cloud computing, more and more analyst reports make predictions about the future of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market. According to these reports, PaaS is:

• The fastest-growing cloud category
• Expected to have a value of $1.7B in 2015

But setting aside predictions about the future of PaaS, what is the state of the current PaaS market? We at Engine Yard were curious about where things stand with PaaS as it exists today, so we decided to conduct a market survey in order to find out. The results shed some interesting light on the application development trends of 2012. Here are some highlights:

• Application development is important. Most companies would rate their apps as either important or business critical.
• Although companies of all sizes are deploying apps in the cloud, there is strong early adoption of PaaS among smaller companies.
• The number one reason companies are using PaaS is for operational improvement, as PaaS eliminates the need for teams to manage their own technology stacks.

Click on the image to check out the full survey.

To find out more insights about the current state of the PaaS market, including many of the drivers influencing the adoption of PaaS, check out the full report, which you can download at www.engineyard.com/paas-survey-2012.. Or, you can view our infographic, which visually highlights the surveys findings.

Are you surprised about the reasons companies are adopting PaaS? Let us know your thoughts. You can always reach me at @mtgaydos on Twitter.