Industry vertical public PaaS in 2014: a market landscape

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Introduction
  3. The characteristics of vertical PaaS
  4. The vertical PaaS players
  5. Recommendations
  6. Key takeaways
  7. About David S. Linthicum

1. Summary

The PaaS market and public cloud services continue to grow in popularity. However, support for services for specific industry verticals, such as retail and healthcare, in PaaS offerings appear to be an afterthought with most public providers.

This mindset is changing. Many services now leverage growing partner ecosystems to provide vertically oriented business processes, services, and applications. And as more enterprises focus on building applications that support industry vertical capabilities, PaaS providers will spend more R&D dollars to produce compatible services.

Key conclusions from this report include:

  • Vertical services and processes are important to enterprises that are building applications in their respective industries using public PaaS providers.
  • Almost all public PaaS providers offer industry vertical security and regulatory compliance, such as HIPAA, SOX, and PCI.
  • Robust partner ecosystems provide the majority of true vertical processes, services, and applications for specific PaaS providers. Google, AWS, and Microsoft have the larger partner ecosystems.
  • Existing as well as future requirements must be considered when selecting PaaS providers that support services for specific industry verticals. This includes understanding a PaaS provider’s roadmap, including integrations and continued growth of partner ecosystems.
  • Those who select PaaS providers around industry vertical capabilities will typically deploy those systems within multicloud implementations. So a core consideration should be the PaaS providers’ ability to work and play well with other public- and private-cloud technology.

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