According to Gartner, the PaaS (platform as a service) market will grow to $1.2 billion this year, up from last year’s $900 million mark.  This is due to the fact that vendors and customers seek easier ways to create new applications as well as migrate existing applications to more efficient platforms.  Indeed, PaaS spending will rise to $1.5 billion in 2013, and reach $2.9 billion by 2016, Gartner states.

However, according to GigaOM Pro, the PaaS market is predicted to reach $20.1 billion dollars in 2014.  The core takeaway is that PaaS is growing.  By how much differs on how the market is defined and who defines it.  The sure bet is that rapid growth of PaaS will increase the amount of investment required by PaaS providers.

While PaaS offerings vary greatly, most provide facilities for application design, deployment, testing, and self-provisioned hosting.  More advanced services may exist in the offering as well, such as team collaboration, database integration, middleware services, Web service integration, storage, state management, and version management services.

The use of PaaS is exploding for a few core reasons:

• Traditional application development and testing is still very expensive.  IT wants to get out of the cycle of endless hardware and tool upgrades.

• PaaS provides the ability to improve development operations.

• Organizations within larger enterprises are leveraging PaaS to quickly build applications, and stay off IT’s radar.