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G00251072

Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service (PaaS),2013Published: 31 July 2013

Analyst(s): Yefim V. Natis

Platform as a service (or cloud application infrastructure services) forms acore layer in cloud architecture. With the software industry "megavendors"entering the PaaS market, the hype (and confusion) concerning PaaS'sarchitecture, merits, prospects and value continues to intensify.

Table of Contents

Analysis..................................................................................................................................................2

What You Need to Know..................................................................................................................2

The Hype Cycle................................................................................................................................ 4

The Priority Matrix.............................................................................................................................7

Off the Hype Cycle........................................................................................................................... 7

On the Rise...................................................................................................................................... 8

Business Analytics PaaS (baPaaS)..............................................................................................8

Cloud IMDG Services............................................................................................................... 11

Cloud MDM Hub Services........................................................................................................ 13

Cloud Event Processing Services..............................................................................................16

Cloud-Enabled Integration Platforms (CEIPs)............................................................................ 18

Cloud Mobile Back-End Services..............................................................................................22

Platform as a Service in China.................................................................................................. 23

ADLM PaaS..............................................................................................................................26

Cloud API Management............................................................................................................28

Cloud Managed File Transfer Services...................................................................................... 30

Cloud-Enabled Application Platform (CEAP)..............................................................................33

Portal PaaS.............................................................................................................................. 35

Private PaaS.............................................................................................................................38

At the Peak.....................................................................................................................................40

bpmPaaS................................................................................................................................. 40



Integration PaaS (iPaaS)........................................................................................................... 44

Platform as a Service (PaaS).....................................................................................................47

IaaS+........................................................................................................................................50

Application PaaS (aPaaS)......................................................................................................... 52

Sliding Into the Trough....................................................................................................................54

Elastic Multitenancy.................................................................................................................. 54

Database Platform as a Service (dbPaaS)................................................................................. 56

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)...............................................................................................59

Climbing the Slope......................................................................................................................... 61

Software as a Service (SaaS).................................................................................................... 61

Appendixes.................................................................................................................................... 62

Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels.......................................................... 64

Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................................68

List of Tables

Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases.................................................................................................................65

Table 2. Benefit Ratings........................................................................................................................66

Table 3. Maturity Levels........................................................................................................................67

List of Figures

Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service (PaaS), 2013.................................................................. 6

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Platform as a Service (PaaS), 2013............................................................... 7

Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS), 2012.................................. 63

Analysis

What You Need to Know

Platform as service (PaaS), also known as cloud application infrastructure services, forms thefoundation of a cloud computing platform. The key role of PaaS is to enable the development,execution, management and life cycle control of application solutions delivered as cloud services.The application solution services enabled by PaaS can be:

■ New or composite business applications

■ Application integration flows

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■ Business process management flows

■ Custom business analytics logic

■ Master data management applications

■ Data stores

■ Cloud back-end data or business logic for mobile front-end applications

■ Other business services

PaaS is to the cloud architecture what middleware is to on-premises application systemarchitecture (see "Now Is the Time for Mainstream IT Organizations to Understand PaaS"). Todeliver on this role, PaaS offerings implement, in the cloud context, the core applicationinfrastructure (middleware) capabilities found on-premises in application servers, integrationplatforms, business process management (BPM) suites, database management systems (DBMSs),portals and user experience technologies, as well as in development, management and governancetools.

PaaS offerings are always software services (with few exceptions, no software is delivered to thesubscriber), although, in some cases, the technology that is powering a PaaS offering is also madeavailable as a software product. Such software is cloud-enabled and is purchased by ITorganizations for private cloud projects or by aspiring cloud services providers. When offered as asoftware product, the offering is referred to as cloud-enabled software or cloud-enabled platform —for example, a cloud-enabled application platform (CEAP) or a cloud-enabled integration platform(CEIP). It is also often referred to as just "private PaaS," referring to the typical use pattern, but thisreference misrepresents a software product (cloud-enabled middleware software) as a service(private cloud middleware service) and serves only to increase confusion around PaaS and cloud.

Gartner is tracking more than 130 PaaS offerings, composed of 15 different subtypes of PaaS,including application PaaS (aPaaS), integration PaaS (iPaaS) and database PaaS (dbPaaS; see"Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013"). Such a proliferation ofspecialties and specialist vendors is not sustainable in the long term:

■ The technical challenges of integrating separately established, deployed and run PaaS specialtyservices can result in unnecessary and destabilizing complexity and performance overhead.Integration of various middleware components on-premises can be difficult, but it is more so ifthe middleware software resides in different data centers, owned by different service providers.

■ PaaS providers are looking to create substantial long-term relationships with their customers byparticipating in diverse customer initiatives that, in turn, require a comprehensive and integratedportfolio of services.

■ Although the specialist providers may functionally excel in their specialties, it takes a majorinvestment in technology and talent to build a competitive cloud data center network. Smallerspecialists must rely on third-party co-location data centers, which will become theconcentrators of cloud services offerings from variety of providers, competing with the fewmajor PaaS providers with their own data center networks and mostly their own software.

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■ Mergers and acquisitions, typical to an emerging market (recent examples include theacquisition of LongJump by Software AG and of RollBase by Progress Software), will propelsome providers to leading market positions and lead others to exit the market.

Gartner has forecast the consolidation of many specialist PaaS offerings into PaaS suites that willbe integrated and co-located collections of application infrastructure functionality targeting theprevailing cloud computing project types (see "PaaS Road Map: A Continent Emerging"). The twomost prominent PaaS suites emerging are aPaaS (typically integrated with a database service) andiPaaS; however, others, such as BPM PaaS (bpmPaaS) or application development and life cyclemanagement (ADLM) PaaS, are growing in adoption as well (typically in some coordination withaPaaS and iPaaS). Ultimately, the leading PaaS providers will feature multiple specialized PaaSsubtypes and multiple PaaS suites to meet organizations' requirements across a broad spectrum ofprojects — offered from one integrated and co-located cloud environment.

In 1H13, most major application infrastructure vendors (including IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and SAP)moved some of their strategic PaaS offerings off beta into production or limited release. By the endof 2013, all will have delivered some generally available PaaS offerings and will begin building thecustomer base. Other notable well-established software vendors, such as Software AG and Tibco,have also unveiled their strategic visions for cloud computing and are offering initial PaaS services.They are joining Google, Microsoft and salesforce.com, which have established mind share as PaaSproviders through their early investments in this market. Dell, Red Hat, Progress Software, WSO2,Pivotal and many others continue with their strategic investment in PaaS. Salesforce.comForce.com leads the PaaS market share by a substantial revenue margin, with estimated low-six-digit PaaS revenue; the majority of PaaS vendors across categories are relatively small, withestimated low-five-digit revenue. Although the smallest of the three major cloud markets (IaaS andSaaS being the other two), the PaaS market will continue to experience a fast rate of growththrough 2017 (see "Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2017, 2Q13 Update").

Although PaaS is generally perceived as a uniform category of cloud services, in reality, each PaaSsubtype (category) is differentiated not only in terms of functionality and use cases, but also byadoption drivers, buying centers, providers' commercial approach (such as pricing structure),adoption level and technical maturity. Therefore, one vendor offering a certain PaaS subtype is not aguarantee for the quality of other PaaS subtype offerings from the same vendor. The otherconsequence of this segmentation is that user organizations don't really buy PaaS as a generalcapability, but buy different PaaS subtypes (or combinations thereof) to support different type ofprojects. (Still, most appreciate knowing that the same provider can deliver other platform servicesif required by new projects in the future.)

The Hype Cycle

PaaS is a relatively new and immature market (which is reflected in the placement of most of thetechnology profiles to the left of the peak). Most technologies emerging in this category are stillunfamiliar to mainstream IT leaders. Many equate PaaS with aPaaS. However, in reality, the fullscope of PaaS includes multiple functional components, all of which appear at different stages ofmaturity, most having not yet reached their peak of market popularity, recognition or adoption. Notjust users, but software vendors as well continue to discover new opportunities in the cloud.




This year, we introduce several new functional types of PaaS that have emerged into the market inthe last 12 months, including cloud master data management (MDM) hub, event processing, mobileback-end and in-memory data grid (IMDG) services.

CIOs, CTOs, other IT planners, strategic architects and technology buyers should understand thattechnologies that are well into the Slope of Enlightenment and beyond represent the mature andproven offerings, carrying a low risk of the unknown. However, these technologies, used widely bymainstream IT organizations, are also unlikely to provide strong competitive differentiation for theorganization. For that, users must turn to the more risky — but also more differentiating —technologies at the stage of the Trough of Disillusionment or earlier. Here, users will find leading-edge technological innovations and will encounter a variety of vendor-innovators. Usingtechnologies that are at the early stages of development, users can create new and unique softwaresolutions and begin building expertise for their future IT strategies. Most organizations are advisedto use technologies from the entire spectrum of the Hype Cycle, applying proper consideration forthe associated risks and opportunities.




Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service (PaaS), 2013

Innovation Trigger

Peak ofInflated

Expectations

Trough of Disillusionment Slope of Enlightenment

Plateau of Productivity

time

expectations

Plateau will be reached in:

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 yearsobsoletebefore plateau

As of July 2013

Business Analytics PaaS(baPaaS)

Cloud IMDG Services

Cloud MDM Hub Services

Cloud Event Processing Services

Cloud-Enabled IntegrationPlatforms (CEIPs)

Cloud Mobile Back-End ServicesPlatform as a Service in China

ADLM PaaSCloud API Management

Cloud Managed File Transfer Services

Cloud-Enabled ApplicationPlatform (CEAP)

Portal PaaSPrivate PaaS

bpmPaaSIntegration PaaS (iPaaS)

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

IaaS+

Application PaaS (aPaaS)

Elastic Multitenancy

Database Platform as a Service (dbPaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Source: Gartner (July 2013)




The Priority Matrix

PaaS is a key component of the larger cloud computing phenomenon. Its overall impact istransformational, and most of its component technology profiles are rated as having high ortransformational benefit. Although many technologies we track here are relatively new, Gartnerexpects rapid development in this space, with most of the technologies reaching maturity during thenext five years.

Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Platform as a Service (PaaS), 2013

benefit years to mainstream adoption

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years

transformational Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Platform as a Service in China

high Application PaaS (aPaaS)

bpmPaaS

Cloud API Management

Cloud IMDG Services

Cloud-Enabled Application Platform (CEAP)



Integration PaaS (iPaaS)

Private PaaS


moderate Software as a Service (SaaS)

Business Analytics PaaS (baPaaS)


Cloud Mobile Back-End Services


IaaS+

Portal PaaS

ADLM PaaS


Cloud-Enabled Integration Platforms (CEIPs)

low

As of July 2013


Off the Hype Cycle

Open PaaS: Open PaaS is a reference to an offering designed and promoted as open andinteroperable for users. This concept began with great promise from vendors such as VMware (now




Pivotal) and Red Hat. However, the main promoters of this concept no longer speak about it, andbuyers deciding about PaaS products, while certainly still concerned with interoperability, are notprioritizing openness in their decisions. Openness will continue to be an issue and will likely grow inimportance as the PaaS market matures and supplier independence becomes more significant. Attoday's level of maturity, other characteristics have eclipsed openness, so this technology profilehas been removed from the Hype Cycle.

Cloud message-oriented middleware (MOM) services: Cloud MOM services no longer appear onthe Hype Cycle for PaaS because the level of public discussion of this topic has faded. As we notedin last year's report, the hype associated with these offerings has always been lower than that ofmany other kinds of cloud services. Vendors continue to expand their product offerings, andcompanies are increasing their use of cloud MOM, but most services are provided as part of largerproducts, such as those bundled into software as a service (SaaS), cloud-enabled integrationplatforms, iPaaS, aPaaS, bpmPaaS or other offerings. For most users, cloud MOM services willreach maturity as an embedded feature of larger software suites, tracked separately on this HypeCycle and elsewhere.

Comprehensive PaaS: The notion of a comprehensive (also referred to as "integrated" or"multifunction") PaaS has not become a subject of promotion or public discourse. Although theleading PaaS providers continue to add functionality to their offerings, progressing toward a broadcomprehensive suite of PaaS capabilities, the users and vendors continue to focus their attentionon more narrowly defined functions. Comprehensive PaaS is in effect a byproduct of developmentof various PaaS offerings and is not recognized as a type of offering in its own right. While multipleservice providers are sure to reach the point of offering a nearly comprehensive set of middlewareservices, their offerings will continue to be focused on a portfolio of differentiated services and noton a single comprehensive service.

To represent the PaaS market trends with increased clarity, we decided to remove severaltechnology profiles as not sufficiently relevant. All remain actively covered in other Hype Cyclereports. These include:

■ Integration brokerage (see "Hype Cycle for Cloud Services Brokerage, 2013")

■ Cloud services brokerage (see "Hype Cycle for Cloud Services Brokerage, 2013")

■ Web and application hosting (see "Hype Cycle for IT Infrastructure and Outsourcing Services,2013")

■ SOA (see "Hype Cycle for Application Architecture")

■ Cloud computing (see "Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2013")

On the Rise

Business Analytics PaaS (baPaaS)

Analysis By: Joao Tapadinhas


http://iapps.gartner.com/webdv/DocDisplayServlet?Doccode=250415








Definition: Business analytics platform as a service (baPaaS) includes optimized infrastructure,tools and deployment best practices, delivered from cloud provider's data centers, that enableaccess to and analysis of information to improve organizations' performance. Solutions are oftenarchitected with integrated information management and business analytics stacks. These compriseof database, integration capabilities and business analytics tools — or with business analytic toolsonly — leveraging autonomous cloud-based or on-premises data repositories.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: BaPaaS is gaining functionalities, credibility andtraction among customers. More vendors now have cloud-based solutions available and deliver abroader set of capabilities such as interactive visualization data discovery and predictive modeling.The solutions delivery is becoming more flexible and can be made entirely through the cloud or, insome cases, through hybrid models where the business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools arecloud-based but the data repository is located, managed and queried on-premises. This avoidshaving to transfer, update or process large data volumes and addresses concerns about thesensitivity of the information being uploaded.

Also, for the first time in 2013, two specialized baPaaS vendors — Birst and GoodData — wereincluded in Gartner's BI and analytics Magic Quadrant, raising customer awareness and confirmingthe upward trend. Conversely, large traditional on-premises BI vendors have now given validity tobaPaaS because they have started to invest in this area. They have not been in the data discoverymarket for a long time, letting it grow and reshape customer demand. However, they now seemmore determined to ensure baPaaS is successful in the cloud business analytics space. Theirsolutions are taking shape and in some cases becoming key offerings in their portfolios, such asSAP's Lumira Cloud or MicroStrategy Cloud. Customers are reacting to this effort and starting toconsider and experiment with cloud-based products as workgroup or domain-focused solutionsthat could gradually evolve to full-scale replacements of on-premises BI platforms.

Customer feedback shows us that the migration path — despite taking a long time and requiringcaution — tends to go from on-premises to cloud-based options, when customers experiment withit. Solutions are proving to be a flexible, easy and quick way to deliver BI and analytics content,solving current problems of time to market, scalability, elasticity and capital spending. Despitestarting from a very small base, there will be a sustained expansion with a compound annual growthrate of approximately 30% through 2017 for BI PaaS (see "Forecast Overview: Public CloudServices, Worldwide, 1Q13 Update").

The combination of cloud-based platforms and the domain-specific information delivered throughreports, dashboards and analytic models — all managed by cloud vendors — becomes businessanalytics software as a service (baSaaS). Examples include the consumer-analysis-focused solutionfrom PivotLink and GoodData's domain-specific data monetization solutions. Also, unlike baPaaS,baSaaS solutions can be consumed "out-of-the-box" by customer organizations without the needfor further development.

User Advice: Many baPaaS solutions embed cloud-to-cloud data integration capabilities, throughnative connectivity to cloud-based data sources such as salesforce.com, NetSuite, Twitter(commonly used in sentiment analysis), SuccessFactors (an SAP company) and to other clouddeployments. If your internal business data is already outside the corporate firewall — being




captured and stored in the cloud — or if you need to analyze external data that is delivered throughthe cloud, consider using baPaaS to analyze it rather than bringing it on-premises.

By leveraging these cloud repositories and easy-to-use baPaaS solutions, organizations can evengo beyond delivering BI and analytics to their users — opening the data repositories and BI tools toexternal partners or customers — by using cloud-based applications. Cloud information serviceswill evolve from there, allowing the delivery and embedding of information snippets that transcendorganizations' boundaries, connecting organizations to stakeholders. Some will include informationmonetization objectives but many others will simply be a way to strengthen the relationship withcustomers or to improve the performance of partners. Consider the creation of a cloud-basedcustomer-facing analytics application to open up your business analytics ecosystem to customersand partners.

Business Impact: BaPaaS products offload server infrastructure and the administration/supportburden while allowing IT and business teams more time to focus on analyzing data that drivesbusiness performance. Clients that have embarked on these initiatives cite three approaches thatimpact their organizations:

■ Augmentation — Using baPaaS services to augment an on-premises business analyticssystem, leading to a faster time to value and more targeted analytic deployment for specificbusiness areas.

■ Replacement — Using baPaaS to replace key components of the business analyticsinfrastructure, usually starting with a line of business or a particular type of content. For some,this "replacement" model is used to prove the concept and value of baPaaS.

■ Process enablement — Using baPaaS to enable cross-enterprise collaboration and planning,opening up data analysis for sharing between constituents in an extended value chain.

Compared to on-premises deployments, customers using baPaaS should experience faster time tovalue, lower initial costs and less need to maintain expensive skills to support a hardware- andsoftware-rich analytic platform.

Benefit Rating: Moderate

Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: 1010data; Birst; GoodData; Jaspersoft; Microsoft; MicroStrategy; SAP(BusinessObjects); Tibco Software (Spotfire)

Recommended Reading:

"Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013"

"Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 1Q13 Update"

"Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms"




"Make Customer-Facing Analytics Part of Your Business Model"

Cloud IMDG Services

Analysis By: Massimo Pezzini

Definition: Cloud in-memory data grid (IMDG) services are a form of PaaS that enables theimplementation of a data grid in the cloud. A data grid is an in-memory, distributed and object-oriented transactional data store that can be partitioned across multiple clustered and replicatednodes. In this way, it is possible to store (in-memory) large amounts of data, and, in case of a nodefailure, the data in the associated partition is still available in the mirror nodes. Cloud applicationsprimarily use these services to store transient data and for caching.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A data grid stores data in-memory, typically objectsthat can be retrieved by means of a primary key, and it can be partitioned across multiple clusterednodes; consequently, it is possible to store (in-memory) large amounts (theoretically up to exabytesbut up to several terabytes in real-life situations) of data (in some cases, across potentially hundredsof nodes and multiple [usually two or three] data centers). Each partition can be replicated in realtime and in a transactional fashion on one or multiple (typically two) "mirror" nodes. Therefore, incase of a node failure, the data in the associated partition is still available in the mirror nodes.Notably, all these details are hidden to applications: They don't need to know where the data isphysically stored to retrieve or update it. Moreover, replication and recovery from failover areautomatically and transparently managed by the cloud IMDG service (see "What IT Leaders Need toKnow About In-Memory Data Grids").

Cloud IMDG services (at times also referred to as "imdgPaaS") reflect, as cloud services, thecapabilities of on-premises IMDG products such as Oracle Coherence, Pivotal GemFire, SoftwareAG's Terracotta BigMemory, GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform, IBM's WebSphere eXtremeScale, ScaleOut Software StateServer and others (see "Gartner Who's Who in In-Memory DataGrids: Vendors' Strategies, Strengths and Challenges"). However, usually only the core features ofon-premises IMDGs are supported by their current cloud counterparts. This is a consequence of therelative immaturity of cloud IMDG services compared with on-premises IMDG products. These havebeen available for almost a decade, and the most popular products account for hundreds, if notthousands, of production customers.

No platform as a service (PaaS) provider exists that exclusively offers cloud IMDG services. Thesecapabilities are always made available as a component, often separately priced, of a broader PaaSoffering that typically includes application PaaS (aPaaS), database PaaS (dbPaaS) and othercapabilities. Of the on-premises IMDG vendors, only Microsoft also provides a cloud servicesrendition of its technology. All other cloud IMDG service providers leverage and extend thememcached open-source technology to implement the service and do not offer their own, cloud-enabled IMDG software for on-premises deployments.

Cloud IMDG services (for example, Microsoft Azure Caching) have been available only for two orthree years, and their use for production deployments is still limited. They usually provide corepartitioning, replication/mirroring and failover capabilities, as well as security, monitoring and




multitenancy support, but not the most advanced features that are typically found in on-premisesIMDG products (for example, programmable containers, query languages, distributed processing,persistency mechanisms, eventing and cross-data-center replications). This makes cloud IMDGservices primarily suitable for supporting distributed-caching and transient-data-storing scenarios,whereas their on-premises counterparts are also used in more sophisticated use cases (such as bigdata analytics, streaming analytics and support for database of record in business-criticalapplications). However, in the next three years, Gartner expects the leading IMDG providers tosupply cloud services renditions of their products, therefore progressively closing the functional gapbetween the on-premises and cloud-services offerings and making them suitable to address someof the most advanced use cases that are currently supported by on-premises IMDGs.

User Advice: Cloud IMDG services provide the typical benefits of cloud services: self-serviceprovisioning, pay per use, minimal IT operation burden on users, strong security and elastic scaling.However, given their functional limitations and relative immaturity, cloud IMDG services can only beused in a subset of the on-premises IMDG use cases.

Primarily, these services are used to complement a co-located aPaaS by providing an in-memorydata store for permanent or transient (for example, shopping carts, session data) data or to cachedata that is stored in a dbPaaS or on-premises DBMS.

The ultimate benefit of cloud IMDG services is to help developers implement high-performance,highly scalable cloud applications by keeping in-memory, frequently accessed, typically read-mostlydata. Therefore, application development managers should adopt cloud IMDG services to supportthe implementation of Web or mobile applications that serve a large community of users and thatsustain high throughputs (up to tens of thousands of transactions per second) with low latency. Assuch, these types of services are particularly useful in applications such as social networking, onlinegaming, media and news websites, e-commerce and other scenarios with global-classrequirements.

Business Impact: Cloud IMDG services enable organizations to retrofit (with minimal impact)established cloud applications to increase their performance and scalability as well as to supportdevelopment of global-class Web and mobile-enabled cloud applications. Thus, organizations canenhance the productivity of their business processes, speed operations, support low-latencyrequirements, improve user/customer/supplier/employee satisfaction and extend the reach of cloudapplications to global user constituencies while protecting investments in their established cloudapplication assets.

In combination with aPaaS, dbPaaS and other cloud services, cloud IMDG services enableorganizations to develop cloud-enabled transaction-processing-oriented applications — forexample, global-class e-commerce, online advertisement, software as a service (SaaS) and socialnetworks — that cannot otherwise be supported by classic aPaaS while maintaining the self-service, elastic-scaling, fast-project-start and operating expenditure (opex) approach that is enabledby public cloud models.

Benefit Rating: High





Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Amazon Web Services; Google; Heroku; Microsoft


"What IT Leaders Need to Know About In-Memory Data Grids"

"What You Need to Know Before Deploying In-Memory Data Grids"

"Gartner Who's Who in In-Memory Data Grids: Vendors' Strategies, Strengths and Challenges"

"In-Memory Data Grids Enable Global-Class Web and Mobile Applications (While Not BankruptingYour Company)"


Analysis By: Bill O'Kane; Andrew White; Saul Judah

Definition: Cloud master data management (MDM) hub services are either multitenant softwareoffered as SaaS or for assembly and development as platform as a service (PaaS). SaaS MDM hubservices are typically based on a subscription (a per user per month fee, for example) or on a perusage basis, rather than on the purchase of a perpetual license.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Cloud computing is complex, with many vendors,service providers and organizations using the term loosely to describe:

■ A variety of different models of cloud computing, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS),PaaS and SaaS.

■ A variety of tenancy models, ranging from traditional hosted single-tenant to multitenant.

■ Public and private clouds.

At present, nearly all MDM software is implemented on-premises, and many industries (financialservices, for example) are reluctant to place important, frequently shared information such ascustomer or financial master data outside of a firewall. In addition, there is resistance to the ideathat the governance of one's primary information assets can be run from outside of the firewall. Therelative youth of many on-premises production MDM implementations also appears to be a factor inthe overall reluctance to move these functions outside the firewall. This may, however, dissipateover time as the level of confidence increases along with the capability to manage its risk. Thesefactors come together to hold this technology's position on the Hype Cycle steady with last year's.Privacy issues have also dampened adoption of SaaS in some regions such as Europe. However,on-premises MDM solutions are increasingly being integrated with SaaS-based businessapplications, such as those of salesforce.com and various cloud-sourced data services (such asdata quality or data integration as a service) that can help with on-premises MDM implementations.




There are already examples of MDM solutions being implemented in the public cloud. Some aresingle-tenant-hosted deployments of MDM solutions on IaaS servers, such as Amazon's ElasticCompute Cloud, and are not designed to be enterprise MDM solutions. Instead, they are intendedto meet the needs of proofs of concept (POC), technology-development activities, or defined (andhence limited) scenarios. For example, cloud MDM hub services could be leveraged to meet theneeds of a particular line of business or business function, such as sales (for territory management)and marketing (for lead generation) or procurement (for supplier-spending analysis), or the needs ofa specific initiative (such as to fulfill reporting requirements relating to the U.S. Sunshine Act in thefield of life sciences).

In 2013, Gartner is seeing an increase in interest in cloud MDM hub services, although they are stilla very small component of the overall MDM market spend, and less than 3% of our MDM inquiriesin the previous year had a cloud-based element. Service providers and vendors, includingCognizant, IBM, Informatica, Oracle and Orchestra Networks, are among those with cloud MDMhub services. Most vendors offer both on-premises and cloud deployment. Due to their newness,most cloud MDM hub service offerings lack strong references and none offer enterprisewide MDMreferences. Several other MDM vendors, including Riversand Technologies and Stibo, have cloudMDM hub service implementations — or offer such support only as a POC — but are notaggressively marketing them. Finally, Dell Boomi has also recently introduced a cloud MDM hubservices offering, with no on-premises option.

User Advice: Interest in cloud MDM hub services is coming from a number of directions:

■ Organizations that have already built up a comfort level in running SaaS applications, such asfrom salesforce.com, and want to take this a step further: These organizations can improve dataquality in their cloud environment or integrate it with their on-premises or other cloudapplications.

■ Business buyers who have a need to meet a particular business requirement, such as theneed to meet regulatory requirements: In these situations, it isn't really operational,enterprisewide MDM that is being considered. It is more of an initiative-specific deployment,often enabled by an analytical MDM solution, where the buyer neither possesses the skills toimplement on-premises, nor really cares where the solution is deployed and is happier with anoperating-expense funding model.

■ Organizations that are planning enterprisewide MDM programs and want to speeddeployment of the first phase: These organizations do so by implementing their chosen MDMsolution hosted on cloud IaaS, with a view to bringing it on-premises later, often simultaneouslywith going live.

■ Organizations that already are comfortable with buying data-enrichment services: Theseorganizations could go a step further and actually pay (as a service) for the governed masterdata itself from those same data-enrichment service providers.

If the business model for cloud attracts you, then monitor developments, but be aware that cloudMDM hub services are still emerging and that their most appropriate use is for certain definedscenarios or specific services and not for enterprise MDM. The business and technology risksshould be assessed against any perceived benefits.




As cloud MDM hub services become more mature, and if you are an early adopter, considerimplementing those solutions if you don't have the skills in-house, if funding out of operatingexpenses is more acceptable than out of capital expenses, and if the planned MDM capability isrestricted in scope to mainly one functional group within your organization (or is initiative-specificand suited to a consolidation-style implementation mainly used for analysis and reportingpurposes). If you are implementing an enterprisewide operational MDM capability that requires tight,real-time, potentially transactional integration with existing and new business applications, or thatrequires complex workflow and application interaction patterns, then execute the MDM solution on-premises or in a private cloud behind the firewall.

Organizations with complex requirements should not assume that they will significantly lower theirtotal cost of ownership or reduce complexity by moving to cloud MDM hub services. However,organizations with tight capital budgets, and those that are IT-resource-constrained or want to getsomething simple deployed quickly, should consider these services, as long as they mitigate theirrisks with appropriate governance controls. As with any product, an organization should evaluatethe functional capabilities of a cloud MDM services solution in order to meet its specificrequirements.

Business Impact: The availability of cloud MDM services potentially offers organizations newfunding models, deployment flexibility and improved time to value. Once these services gain somematurity, MDM in the cloud is likely to have the effect of lowering expenses for the first two yearsafter implementation, relative to on-premises MDM solutions, because the cloud model does notrequire an upfront capital investment. However, in common with other cloud offerings, cloud MDMservices may become more expensive as the years go by because the operating expense does notdecrease in subsequent years. These services will also be potentially helpful to companies that donot have the IT resources to deploy and maintain on-premises software. This is prevalent in small ormidsize businesses but is also applicable to large businesses that may have experienced ITdepartment downsizing.

Cloud MDM hub services will further complicate an organization's application architectures, leadingto more complex integration and data-governance requirements. Cloud-based technologiesgenerally lead to greater fragmentation of the enterprise's software infrastructure and applicationsportfolio. In contrast to the vision of an on-premises applications portfolio dominated by a singlevendor's suite, many organizations are moving toward a hybrid mix of on-premises and cloud-based business applications. End-to-end business processes will, however, need to be optimizedacross these multiple platforms and systems and, because master data is the most heavily sharedinformation in an organization, there will be a need to build a great deal of complex integration intothe MDM system, the contributing data sources and the end-to-end processes.

The availability of cloud MDM hub services will not be applicable to all organizations because dataprivacy and security issues remain, particularly relating to customer data. Many industries,particularly financial services, are reluctant to place such important, sensitive and heavily sharedinformation as master data outside the firewall due to the risk of potential security or privacy issues.In particular, many banks take the view that their regulators would not allow them to managecustomer or employee master data in the cloud. However, organizations are increasingly leveragingSaaS business applications (such as Oracle's RightNow, salesforce.com, SAP's SuccessFactors,




and Workday), so an increasing amount of key data is already sitting in the cloud and being used inessential business processes. There is also the question of public versus private clouds.Organizations with sensitive data may well feel that such data can't be put in a public cloud, but aprivate cloud is fine because the data is effectively within the firewall.


Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Cognizant; Dell Boomi; IBM; Informatica; Oracle; Orchestra Networks; SumTotalSystems


"The Advent of Master Data Management Solutions in the Cloud Brings Opportunities andChallenges"

"Cool Vendors in Information Governance and MDM, 2013"

"Three Trends That Will Shape the Master Data Management Market"

"NIST and Gartner Cloud Approaches Are More Similar Than Different"

"Data in the Cloud: The Changing Nature of Managing Data Delivery"


Analysis By: W. Roy Schulte; Nick Heudecker

Definition: Cloud event processing services are delivered by event-driven cloud applications thatprocess high-volume event streams quickly and efficiently. The applications are "event-driven"because the computation is triggered immediately as input data is received. Cloud event processingservices provide widely varying levels of built-in support for complex-event processing (CEP).

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Cloud event processing is an embryonic field with abright future. Cloud event processing services are hosted in private or third-party public clouds. Thesoftware platforms currently used to implement cloud event processing services are "cloud-based"rather than "cloud-native" because they get most of their cloud capabilities from the underlyinginfrastructure as a service. Such cloud capabilities include support for multiple concurrent tenants(separate applications competing for shared resources), dynamic scalability (elasticity), self-serviceprovisioning and individualized resource utilization tracking. Event processing, including cloud eventprocessing, makes extensive use of in-memory technology for high performance and scalability.

The first cloud event processing services appeared in 2011, and most offerings are less than twoyears old. Leading-edge companies are experimenting with them, but most mainstream projectteams have not heard of them. Moreover, companies are adopting CEP (cloud and noncloud) at aslow rate because its architecture is so different from conventional system design. However, CEP is




the only way to get many kinds of insight from event streams in real-time or near-real-time, andmany companies will want the benefits of cloud delivery as they increase their use of CEP. Theamount of event data available to companies is growing rapidly. Input event streams come fromsensors, transactional application systems, market data providers, social computing (activitystreams), tweets, Web-based news feeds, email systems and other sources. We expect the hype tobuild quickly and companies to ramp up their use of this technology as the offerings mature andcompanies do more CEP during the next five years. Cloud event processing is especially relevantwhen one or more of the event sources or user applications are in the cloud or in a businesspartner. As software as a service and platform as a service become more popular, the demand toput event processing in the cloud will increase in parallel.

User Advice: Companies should use event processing to enhance their situation awareness and toautomate certain kinds of decisions, particularly those that must be made in real time or near realtime.

The cloud event processing services currently available are potentially relevant when a businessneeds CEP-oriented analytics. CEP is a kind of computing in which incoming event data is distilledinto more useful, higher-level "complex" event data that provides insights into what is happening.Choosing the right cloud event processing service depends on the applied use case, as well as thelevel of internal development expertise. Companies should use general-purpose services such asHStreaming Cloud, IBM InfoSphere Streams and SQLstream when they need to develop their ownapplication solution. These services have varying numbers of built-in statistical functions, tools forbuilding business dashboards, alerting mechanisms and graphical development tools (all three arealso available for on-premises use, when appropriate). Companies with a need for Web marketinganalytics should consider Webtrends for its off-the-shelf, purpose-specific extensions for this kindof application. Leading-edge companies that bet on new technologies for a competitive edgeshould consider Grok because of its machine-learning capabilities for discovering new eventpatterns with minimal human effort.

Public cloud event processing is particularly relevant when one or more of the input event streamsoriginates off-premises, such as in a cloud-based application, Twitter, Web-based news feed, socialcomputing activity stream or an application in a business partner, or from government, industry orscientific data sources. On-premises, private cloud event processing or noncloud event processingshould be implemented when most of the data originates within the company's walls or when acompany wants more control over deployment and security.

Business Impact: CEP helps in operational activities that run continuously and need ongoingmonitoring, using a sense-and-respond approach. It can apply to near-real-time precisionmarketing (cross-selling and upselling), fraud detection, factory floor and website monitoring,customer contact center management, trading systems for capital markets and transportationoperation management (for airlines, trains, shipping and trucking).

CEP:

■ Improves the quality of decision making by presenting information that would otherwise beoverlooked.




■ Enables faster responses to threats and opportunities.

■ Helps shield business people from data overload by eliminating irrelevant information andpresenting only alerts and distilled versions of the important information.

■ Reduces the cost of manually processing the growing volume of event data.

Cloud event processing has the potential to reduce the cost of supporting CEP applications thatinvolve very high throughput (many events per second), particularly if the workloads are fast-growing or vary in an unpredictable manner. It also enjoys the familiar cloud benefits of self-provisioning. Cloud event processing will add real-time intelligence to operational technology (OT)and business IT applications. OT is hardware and software that detects or causes a change,through the direct monitoring and/or control of physical devices, processes and events in anenterprise. OT goes by various names in different industries, and is often owned and operatedindependently of IT systems. The emerging "Internet of Things" is likely to be one of the key driversfor implementing cloud event processing.


Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience

Maturity: Embryonic

Sample Vendors: Grok; HStreaming; IBM; Microsoft; SQLstream; Webtrends



Cloud-Enabled Integration Platforms (CEIPs)


Definition: A cloud-enabled integration platform (CEIP) provides, as a licensed software product, acombination of features that were previously found in enterprise service buses (ESBs), orchestrationengines, data integration tools, B2B gateways, managed file transfer (MFT) and governanceplatforms. These features are implemented on a multitenant, elastically scalable foundation so thatthey can be deployed on private cloud environments to support a private integration platform as aservice (iPaaS) delivery model.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The CEIP market is emerging in the wake of the iPaaSmarket, of which CEIP is, to a certain extent, a complementary aspect (see "What IT Leaders Needto Know About Integration PaaS for Cloud Services Integration (and More)").

A CEIP extends core integration platform capabilities with multitenancy, elastic scale, self-serviceand other cloud features, which can be used to implement a sort of "private" iPaaS. Typically, CEIPtechnology is packaged into a software product that user organizations (or other service providers)buy as licensed software, deploy in their private cloud environment, and then administer, manage,monitor and operate by themselves. This is opposed to the well-known (public) iPaaS setting where




a CEIP is deployed in a service provider's data center as well as operated by that same serviceprovider. Its functionality is available to user organizations as a subscription-based cloud service.

Certain iPaaS providers see the ability to commercialize the software underlying their offerings inthe form of a CEIP as a way to address user requirements for which an in-the-cloud integrationplatform would be less than ideal (for example, to support demanding internal application-to-application or service-oriented architecture [SOA] backplane requirements), to enable private iPaaSor to sell their technology to other service providers that wish to implement iPaaS offerings. ManyiPaaS providers (for example, Dell Boomi and Microsoft) do not deliver their capabilities in the formof a CEIP but prefer to remain 100% focused on a cloud services business model. In other cases(for example, Cordys), the vendor is totally dedicated to developing and commercializing a CEIPsoftware product and doesn't deliver an iPaaS rendition of it.

Vendors' releases of CEIP products and user adoption have been slowly growing over the past 12months in the wake of the increasing popularity of cloud-based applications and Web APIs. Often,user organizations consume CEIP capabilities in the form of iPaaS features that are delivered bysoftware as a service (SaaS), integration brokerage (IB) and cloud services brokerage (CSB)vendors. In particular, CEIP adoption on the part of SaaS vendors and service providers willcontinue to grow as these players increasingly recognize a competitive imperative in the ability todeliver a comprehensive solution for cloud services integration (CSI) as part of their offerings.

User organizations' adoption of CEIP products is still relatively modest. This is because of variousfactors:

■ A still relatively small, although growing, number of products is available in the market.

■ For convenience, small or midsize businesses usually favor an iPaaS approach over adoptingon-premises integration software.

■ Large organizations that have accumulated massive investments in traditional on-premisesintegration platforms (ESBs, extraction, transformation and loading [ETL] and other dataintegration tools, B2B gateways, MFT products and SOA governance tools) don't see enoughcompelling benefits in replacing their established infrastructure with a CEIP approach given thecost, complexity and risk of migrating established integration interfaces from traditionalintegration platforms to a CEIP.

■ User organizations' interest around the notion of private iPaaS is still modest.

However, several trends are at work that will change the status quo:

■ The traditionally differentiated integration technology streams (that is, data, application,process, B2B and cloud integration, and governance) are converging into unified platforms(many iPaaS offerings are manifestations of this trend). Therefore, when users strategicallyreconsider their integration approach, they increasingly look for a platform that supports variouscombinations of requirements. Often, a CEIP is capable of addressing such a desire.

■ Traditional integration platform vendors are in the process of re-engineering (at times evenredeveloping) their technologies to add support for cloud attributes. In this way, they are turning




their traditional integration platforms into CEIPs, both to improve their scalability andmanageability and to address the iPaaS opportunity (either by becoming a supplier of enablingtechnology or by providing cloud services themselves). A few vendors have already releasedinitial versions of their CEIPs, and others are well underway in the effort. In practice, the nextmajor version of many traditional integration platform vendors' products will be a CEIP.Therefore, several user organizations will move to CEIP as part of the natural technologyrefreshment cycle of their established integration platforms.

■ A general trend toward private cloud in large organizations is preparing the groundwork for aPaaS approach to application infrastructure that, in turn, will favor CEIP adoption as thetechnology that is required to implement a private iPaaS (in many organizations, the integrationinfrastructure is already implemented — on top of traditional platforms — as an internal service,often called the SOA backplane, that is shared across multiple departments, business units andso on).

■ Requirements such as CSI, mobile application integration and Web APIs are driving theadoption of productivity-oriented, integration-platform-enabling agile integration methods.iPaaS offerings often have these characteristics; consequently, the CEIP manifestation of theseplatforms may be a compelling option for organizations that wish to maintain an on-premisesintegration platform approach.

However, the transition from traditional integration platforms to CEIP-style products will take severalyears given the early stage of this technology and the time (easily years in the case of largedeployments) that it usually takes organizations to migrate their established integration interfacesand SOA services to a new platform.

User Advice: SaaS providers, system integrators, IBs and CSBs that are interested in providingiPaaS-style features as part of their service portfolio should look at CEIPs as products that they candeploy to implement integration services with full control over the quality of the services and thefunctionality that is delivered to their clients.

To maximize deployment flexibility, opportunities for control and the resilience of their businessprocesses, midsize to large user organizations should favor integration platform providers that areable to deliver offerings in the form of both a CEIP and an iPaaS supporting multiple deploymentmodels (see "iPaaS Expands Beyond Cloud Service Integration Through Flexible DeploymentTopologies"). This will enable organizations to adopt the deployment model (that is, on-premises, inthe cloud or even distributed/hybrid) that best fits the technical or budget requirements of any givenproject. The ability to deploy the same set of integration capabilities in the form of an iPaaS, a CEIPor a hybrid platform enables users also to implement clever strategies for disaster recovery (forexample, by moving their integration flows from on-premises CEIPs to iPaaS in case the formerfails) and scalability (for example, by temporarily deploying some integration flows on iPaaS in casethere's a peak in workload that the on-premises CEIP cannot sustain). In particular, users whoalready leverage an iPaaS offering should evaluate whether additional adoption of the related CEIP(if available) according to a hybrid model can help them better support their requirements.

Large organizations that are moving toward a private-cloud-type system infrastructure and planningto provide a private PaaS arrangement to users (or business partners) should look at CEIP




technology as the key enabler of private iPaaS implementation, especially if they are looking forproductivity-oriented integration platforms.

Users of traditional integration platforms should plan for a likely migration — over the next three tofive years — to CEIP renditions of the products that they use as their technology providers movetoward cloud-enabled versions of their offerings. In doing this, users should also explore theopportunity to reduce their costs by consolidating multiple instances of their integration platformson top of a shared, CEIP-enabled infrastructure, often in the context of private cloud initiatives.

However, user organizations should also consider that CEIP products are, for the most part, new —and in some cases still "in the making" — technologies in the early stages of their life cycles.Although many vendors will provide some degree of backward compatibility with their currentgeneration of on-premises integration platforms, such compatibility, in some cases, will be partialand constrained to well-defined usage scenarios.

To support the implementation of hybrid iPaaS/CEIP architectures, SOA centers of excellence(COEs) and integration competency centers should invest in the technologies, methodologies andskills that are required to effectively manage the greater complexity that these architectures willinevitably entail. This is especially the case if they plan to change their delivery model toward aprivate cloud approach where departments, business units and subsidiaries can leverage a"private" iPaaS approach to implement their own, self-managed integration projects.

Business Impact: Via the use of CEIP technology, SaaS providers, independent software vendors,system integrators, IBs and CSBs will be able to incorporate iPaaS features in their offerings andthus increase their competitive differentiation by providing their clients with more comprehensivesolutions.

User organizations that are adopting CEIPs will be able to potentially reduce their integration costsby deploying an integration infrastructure that is shared across multiple organizational entities vialeveraging the multitenant and elastic capabilities of an underlying private cloud computinginfrastructure. By adopting CEIPs, which are also available in the form of iPaaS offerings, userorganizations will be able to achieve greater flexibility in their business processes through theintroduction of distributed/hybrid cloud/on-premises-based integration strategies.



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: AppPoint Software Solutions; Cordys; IBM; Informatica; Jitterbit; MuleSoft;Pervasive Software; Software AG; WSO2


"What IT Leaders Need to Know About Cloud Services Integration: Proactively Address theChallenge"




"What IT Leaders Need to Know About Integration PaaS for Cloud Services Integration (and More)"

"iPaaS Expands Beyond Cloud Service Integration Through Flexible Deployment Topologies"

"Benefits and Drawbacks of iPaaS as an 'Embedded' Feature of Cloud Services"

Cloud Mobile Back-End Services

Analysis By: Gordon Van Huizen

Definition: Cloud mobile back-end services (which some outside Gartner refer to as "mobile back-end as a service or BaaS") provide the back-end capabilities commonly required for mobileapplications, such as user management, data storage, push notifications, geolocation services andsocial network integration. Beyond offering Web APIs, providers typically offer client libraries fortheir services, making development against the back end a natural extension of coding the mobileapp, using iOS or Android software development kits (SDKs) or JavaScript.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: By 2016, 40% of enterprise mobile applicationdevelopment projects will leverage cloud mobile back-end services.

Although some mobile applications leverage general-purpose cloud-based infrastructure, such asHeroku or Google App Engine, mobile-focused services further accelerate mobile development bytargeting common back-end requirements of mobile applications. Because of the fundamental rolethey play, cloud mobile back-end services are quickly becoming a key component of the mobile ADecosystem. In 2012, Microsoft entered the arena with its Azure Mobile Services, and in October2012, Gartner predicted that other large vendors would offer similar services. In April 2013,salesforce.com launched Salesforce Platform Mobile services, and in May 2013, Facebook enteredinto an agreement to acquire Parse — one of the first vendors to offer a comprehensive set of cloudmobile back-end services. Other PaaS vendors, especially those offering aPaaS and dbPaaSservices will likely also be drawn to offer cloud mobile back-end services as part of their coreofferings.

User Advice: Mobile application development leaders should look for opportunities to use cloudmobile back-end services to speed application delivery, defray sunk costs and better absorb theimpact of change as mobile platforms evolve.

Enterprise IT leaders must recognize that mobile applications may store sensitive data in the cloud;therefore, they should take the proper precautions to ensure its security.

Application development leaders should work with business leaders to associate business metricswith the use of applications backed by cloud services, to justify their use and to build adequatefunding models.

Business Impact: Cloud mobile back-end services accelerate the delivery of mobile applications,resulting in quicker time to benefit. They require minimal upfront investment and can substantiallydecrease the time and cost required to configure, develop and deploy mobile application back-endapplications. They do represent an ongoing operational expense, however, which must be factoredinto the business justification for the mobile applications that they support.






Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: appMobi; Appcelerator; Appery.io; Backendless; Kinvey; Kumulos; Microsoft(Azure); Parse; QuickBlox; salesforce.com; Sencha


"What AD Leaders Need to Know About Cloud Mobile Back-End Services: Don't Enter the CloudUnprepared"

"Accelerate Mobile Application Delivery With Cloud Services"

"Predicts 2012: Enterprises Must Balance Opportunity and Risk in Cloud and Mobile Security"

"Govern Your Services and Manage Your APIs With Application Services Governance"


Analysis By: Matthew Cheung

Definition: A comprehensive platform as a service (PaaS) suite — usually depicted in all-clouddiagrams between the software-as-a-service layer above it and the infrastructure-as-a-service layerbelow — is a broad collection of application infrastructure (middleware) functionality offered as aservice. However, the hype surrounding the PaaS concept today is focused mainly on applicationPaaS as representative of the whole category.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The PaaS competitive landscape in China looks verydifferent from that of the global market since there are a different set of vendors competing fromdifferent angles. Several ISPs have been adopting the Google model and are competing in China'sPaaS market, including Baidu (Baidu App Engine), Tencent (QQ Open Platform), Alibaba (Aliyun) andSina (Sina App Engine). However, most of these vendors target small or midsize businesses (SMBs).Although traditionally these local ISPs are not strong at programming models and architectures oreven software infrastructure, they are able to adopt an open standard and platform approach bysupporting common programming languages, such as PHP, Java and Python. Many local PaaSsolutions from ISPs emphasize swiftly building mobile applications that can be delivered/supportedfrom the cloud — this feature has prompted quite a few consumer-focused (such as gaming and e-commerce) companies and individuals to deploy on these platforms. For example, Zynga's team inChina has localized its games and deployed them on Tencent's PaaS platform. Although thedevelopment of the PaaS market is still emerging in China, we have been seeing more vendorsentering the market during past 12 months, such as Microsoft.

The PaaS market in China has gained traction in the past 12 months mainly due to evolvingbusiness models. As aforementioned, ISPs have enabled developers to share in the revenue and to




tap into their existing customer base; some PaaSs have attracted more than 10,000 developers.The number of active programs developed on PaaS has also been increasing dramatically — forexample, one local provider says 20,000 registered applications have been developed on top of itsPaaS.

International vendors are lagging behind in entering China's PaaS market. Microsoft announced inDecember 2012 that it will work with local ISP 21Vianet to launch its PaaS (Windows Azure) inShanghai. Some international vendors (such as salesforce.com with Force.com and VMware withCloud Foundry) do not even have a Chinese website detailing their PaaS offerings in China. Thislack of marketing and awareness is not the only problem of global players: Protectionism andgovernment regulations also inhibit global players from competing effectively. However,international vendors have an advantage over local PaaS vendors in terms of enterprise mind shareand legacy system business. Many of them have legacy on-premises business in China that theycan leverage to extend their offerings.

Local PaaS vendors take different approaches to database PaaS services. Each has implementedits own model — from Shanda Grand Cloud's database cloud, to Alibaba's Aliyun Open TableService — similar to what foreign vendors have developed, such as Google's BigTable,salesforce.com's Database.com and Microsoft Windows Azure SQL Database. We expect theChinese market will be two to three years behind the mature market in terms of PaaS mainstreamadoption, and vendors' move toward comprehensive PaaS suites will take another two to threeyears from 2013. Moreover, we have not seen any Chinese PaaS providers going abroad andsupporting overseas markets outside China.

For a more general overview of the PaaS market, see "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomyand Vendor Landscape, 2013."

User Advice:

■ Assess local Chinese vendors' strengths and weaknesses, examining whether they have a verystrong enterprises focus. ISPs that provide PaaS solutions may target only SMBs, and they maynot have traditional on-premises business. End users should assess the viability as well as thelongevity of these PaaS players in the Chinese market.

■ Recognize that PaaS can provide application platform, integration, business processmanagement, portal, database management, messaging and other middleware services, butfew vendors currently offer all options. Many users will combine services of multiple providersto meet their project objectives or will combine the use of on-premises middleware with cloudPaaS services.

■ The available PaaS offerings in China are at varying stages of development in terms of maturity,functional completeness and "cloudiness." Users should select PaaS services for their projectscarefully, matching the functionality and service levels of PaaS offerings with their requirements.No provider offers a comprehensive PaaS suite, so users should use services from multipleproviders and combine them with applications and platform technologies on-premises to form ahybrid computing environment.




■ Users should build applications using PaaS to gain expertise in this important emerging area oftechnology. However, applications built using today's PaaS should be designed for ROI withinthe next two to three years to allow the organization the flexibility to transition to more maturePaaS offerings as they emerge.

■ Users should also consider using different PaaS providers for different applications. Users maywant to tap into the large Chinese consumer market by developing consumer-facing mobileapplications or websites on top of a local PaaS, but develop enterprise or traditional officeadministration applications on top of international vendors' platforms.

■ When engaged in long-term planning, users should give preference to vendors that are morelikely to accumulate a comprehensive PaaS offering over time. In the cloud (unlike on-premises,where users can take a best-of-breed approach to selecting component technologies fromdifferent vendors), the winning scenario will be where many platform requirements of anapplication are provided out of one data center footprint of one cloud provider.

Business Impact: Historically, a prerequisite for leadership of software infrastructure markets was avendor's ability to take a leading role in establishing the prevailing programming models andarchitectures for software developers. This role enabled vendors to build partner ecosystems, and aleading ecosystem amounted to sustainable industry leadership. In cloud computing, analogously,the leadership of the PaaS market will require leadership in the evolution of standards, architecturesand best practices in cloud application platforms and application services. The multibillion-dollarglobal market IT vendors, such as Fujitsu, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, salesforce.com and SAP,are all strategically invested in this market.

In China, there is also a good selection of local players competing in the market with opentechnologies. Moreover, most of these local players are ISPs in China, and they have a differentbusiness model than traditional vendors. They also have innovative ways to lure developers (forexample, through revenue sharing), which has given them a unique position in the market. Thisprovides an efficient platform for SMB developers and SOHO individuals/developers to scale andpromote their business.

In the enterprise space, international vendors have been late to the Chinese market, although globalPaaS offerings have grown in maturity and functionality. Gartner believes local Chinese PaaSs willhave difficulty penetrating the enterprise market and attracting independent software vendors ofbusiness applications to develop applications on their platforms since these PaaSs do not havemany customers in the enterprise space. Only a few local PaaS vendors are targeting the enterprisemarket (such as 800APPs). However, while multinational vendors (such as VMware-Pivotal andMicrosoft) are launching their PaaS offerings in China, market awareness will continue to grow, andthere will be more local competition in the near future.

PaaS can help enterprise IT refocus on its core differentiated business and become moreresponsive; however, the cost of IT will most likely not decline. Instead, it will be rearranged, withmore spending going to cloud services providers and brokerages and more internal IT spendingnow focused on the composition of user-facing business solutions, management and integration.Full-scale internal custom engineering will be limited to highly differentiating, specialized custom-made application systems.




Benefit Rating: Transformational


Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: 800APPs; Alibaba; Baidu; Google; Microsoft; salesforce.com; Shanda GrandCloud; Sina; Tencent


"Hype Cycle for Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS), 2013"


"Now Is the Time for Mainstream IT Organizations to Understand PaaS"

"What IT Leaders Need to Know About Application PaaS Models and Use Patterns"

"Gartner Reference Model for PaaS"

ADLM PaaS

Analysis By: Thomas E. Murphy

Definition: Application development life cycle management platform as a service (ADLM PaaS)solutions are defined as cloud-delivered tools designed to govern the development and delivery ofsoftware. These platforms combine core ADLM capabilities with extensibility based on Web serviceprotocols and delivery via cloud infrastructure. ADLM PaaS tools can support on-premises andcloud applications.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Although most ADLM tools are delivered for internaldeployment, ADLM PaaS solutions have been available for several years, and there is increasingvisibility of the major players (e.g., HP, IBM and Microsoft). However, the market is still evolving,with a lack of widely supported standards for metadata models, a lack of service definitions and awide span of solution types. In general, the market is moving from traditional APIs to REST-basedintegration and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), with some growth in support for Open Servicesfor Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) as a standard.

Successful platform providers are now seeing marketplaces form around their offerings, andconsumers are experiencing the value of more rapid innovation, as the community builds newfunctionality on the core platform. These markets bring new functionality to market faster and arealso expanding the addressable market for the products. As the provider focuses on the IT core,third parties can create value into the extended organization (e.g., extending agile planning toolsbeyond the development team).

A hindrance will be the ability to transition from current on-premises solutions into cloud-deliveredsolutions, as many current providers are developing new products for this market, or users will betransitioning from an existing vendor to a new vendor. Integration is often the last area in which


http://open-services.net/

http://open-services.net/



vendors invest, and integration among tools is still uneven in implementation quality. As a result,these initial forays often have limited extensibility or support for integration. However, third-partyintegration middleware facilities are appearing (e.g., Tasktop Sync and Kovair Omnibus IntegrationPlatform). Successful users will begin to establish the role of application development life cyclearchitect to define process and data model standards.

This focus on integration and extensibility will mean that current internal ADLM systems of record(e.g., requirements, test cases, defects and project management) will be enabled to create newsystems of engagement that cross traditional role boundaries and enable greater team flexibility.Current tools have a variety of delivery models, but most of the initial offerings are being deliveredvia the public cloud. During the past year, an increasing number of traditional ADLM solutionproviders began to offer cloud solutions, including, notably, Microsoft and HP.

User Advice: Users should explore ADLM PaaS solutions for small-to-midsize teams, especiallywhere the user population may be dynamic and the focus is on agile methods. Distributed or virtualteams will value ADLM PaaS's simplification of user management and focus on collaboration.Ensure that you are comfortable with the data security and protection against loss, or that you areable to back up data to your location.

Focus on tools that integrate cleanly with deployed ADLM tools and closely examine integrationfacilities pushing vendors for clarity on directions. Also, look for participation in standards efforts,such as OSLC and W3C Linked Data. Organizations using PaaS and, especially, applicationplatform as a service (aPaaS) are strong candidates for ADLM PaaS.

Recognize that integration of application life cycle processes starts with internal standardization ofprocess and data (e.g., defect remediation process and severity and priority definitions). Establishan ADLM architect role to manage these definitions.

Business Impact: The primary impact of ADLM PaaS is the pressure it's putting on the market tocreate tools that enable integration across heterogeneous application development life cyclemanagement tools and processes. ADLM initially started with a focus on single vendor stacks andintegration that was API-centric. Cloud-delivered ADLM services are shifting the overall ADLM toolsmarket to deliver platforms that use a message-oriented architecture and a Web architecture thatsupports distributed repositories, rather than a single monolithic repository. This fits the needs ofmost user organizations, where the elements of the ADLM stack (e.g., requirements managementand quality management) have been acquired by individual teams (such as business analysts andthe quality assurance team) ADLM PaaS solutions provide flexibility. Connecting disparate tools andtheir assets enables teams to realize the value that was initially promised with ADLM.

Closely matched to this is the adoption of agile methods. The ADLM PaaS solutions provide solidsupport, and, by virtue of the delivery format, they tend to be well-designed for the collaborativenature of agile methods. This reduces the complexity of deployment and collaboration for teams,and enables organizations to more readily scale agile practices and support geographicallydispersed teams, taking advantage of labor rates and skills.


http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/data



The business also benefits from ADLM PaaS via the reduced costs of provisioning andmaintenance, as well as the flexibility to match with changing work structures and use internal(potentially distributed) workers, combined with outsourced or crowdsourced development. Bymoving tools toward a more collaborative and browser-delivered format, we believe thatdevelopment and the business can become more tightly integrated. This will provide greatertransparency into project status, as well as support the ability to collaboratively developrequirements and move efficiently through user acceptance testing.



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Atlassian; CloudOne; CollabNet; Elementool; HP; IBM; Kovair; Microsoft; Qmetry;Rally; Tasktop; VersionOne; Zephyr



"Magic Quadrant for Application Life Cycle Management"

"Selection Criteria for Success in Choosing ALM Products"

Cloud API Management

Analysis By: Paolo Malinverno

Definition: API management is a subset of application services governance and significantlyoverlaps service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance. The current concept of API is an evolutionof the concept of a service in SOA (see "Govern Your Services and Manage Your APIs WithApplication Services Governance").

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: API management's basic functionality includes:

■ Implementation and publication of an API that opens new business opportunities (orconsolidates existing ones) and is easily consumable in a secure, process-like fashion by thedevelopers being targeted. Features typically include API discovery, documentation, developeraccess provisioning and key generation, testing and collaboration through a developer's portal.

■ Operational management, security, format translation and the collection of statistics associatedwith the use of the API.

■ Support of API life cycle management (for example, versioning and packaging).

Additional API management functionality or services — not everyone feels they need them, but ingeneral they do — relate to:

■ The planning and design of value-generating APIs




■ The promotion of API usage, targeting all the communities of developers that might beinterested in it

■ The assessment of the real value (for example, monetization) of the API

■ The instrumentation and analytics of the API

API management offerings have been maturing in the market for at least five years, but only in thepast two years (largely because of the rise of mobile apps and the increasing influence of the Nexusof Forces) has usage really ramped up. Most of the APIs are B2B by nature, so these offerings aregenerally cloud-based managed services. Some SOA governance technology (part of applicationservices governance) is run in the cloud, which — for the sake of this document — is consideredpart of cloud API management services.

Competition to share the growth of API management as a phenomenon has been heating upconsiderably recently, with Axway acquiring Vordel (see "Axway/Vordel Deal Could Be Greater Thanthe Sum of Its Parts"), Intel acquiring Mashery (see "Intel's Acquisition of Mashery Bridges SOAGovernance and API Management"), CA Technologies acquiring Layer 7 (see "Sensing a GrowingAPI Management Market, CA Technologies to Buy Layer 7"), and MuleSoft acquiringProgrammableWeb. Acquisitions in this space will continue to be commonplace, as larger playerswill want to buy themselves a slice in a rapidly growing market. Also, APIs usage will spread muchwider than it is now: that's why the peak of the hype has not been reached yet.

User Advice: The importance of APIs will increase steadily in the coming years. More and moreB2B interactions will be API-based (see "Predicts 2013: Application Development"). Cloud servicesbrokerages base their entire business model on Web APIs, and will increasingly need APImanagement (see "Devise a Systematic API Management and Governance Strategy for Long-TermCSB Success").

In addition, corporate applications and mobile apps will be more API-based. IT departments haveless time and fewer resources to develop/buy/maintain all the applications their company needs. Itis only going to get worse:

■ Users will increasingly demand personalized features.

■ More and more digital natives will be joining the company.

■ Mobile will keep pulverizing the current concept of application.

■ Different apps suit different users.

■ The number of channels is multiplying (bring your own device adoption will explode this evenfurther)

■ Web, tablets, smartphones, TVs, video game consoles, cars and more (for example, GoogleGlasses)

■ Each one of them sports several technology platforms




Companies will not be able to afford to provide different experiences for every user. As a result, ITdepartments need to package data and logic from the system or record applications they havetoday (and the few they will acquire/build in the next year or two) into APIs/services and find win/winscenarios where someone else — outside IT and frequently outside the company — will build theminto winning user experiences.

Start thinking about which APIs are good to have, how they can open up new customers and newways of doing business, and you will be thriving in what is already been called the "API economy."

Business Impact: Cloud API management is useful for organizations publishing APIs to expandtheir reach to social, media, mobile and other emerging marketing communication channels. Theseorganizations often need help planning, deploying and managing their API initiatives. It is also usefulto the (frequently mobile application) developers embedding the APIs in their apps. A full-featureddeveloper portal is — and increasingly will be — fundamental to drive API usage. As the number ofpublic APIs grows, cloud services brokerages will offer more and more services built on top of them(according to the three CSB roles: aggregation, integration and customization), and will needsophisticated API management to scale their businesses properly.

APIs are new distribution channels. No CIO can ignore their business potential and thetransformation they will cause in IT departments in the future.



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: 3scale; Apigee; IBM (Cast Iron Systems); Intel (Mashery); Layer 7; MuleSoft; SOASoftware; WS02


"Govern Your Services and Manage Your APIs With Application Services Governance"

"Devise a Systematic API Management and Governance Strategy for Long-Term CSB Success"

"How to Understand the Criteria for the 2013 Application Services Governance Technologies MagicQuadrant"

"Predicts 2013: Application Development"


Analysis By: Benoit J. Lheureux

Definition: Managed file transfer (MFT) platform as a service (also known as MFT PaaS) is a cloudservice that mirrors the functionality of an on-premises MFT software solution. These core functionsinclude the ability to secure files in transit and at rest, as well as reporting and auditing file activity.




Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The adoption of cloud MFT services is still earlymainstream, but is accelerating as more organizations recognize the need and value of a cloud MFTservice solution as an alternative to on-premises deployments, particularly when rapid deploymentand incremental scalability are desirable attributes. Compared with traditional on-premisessolutions, cloud MFT Services do not require large upfront capital investments or installation andconfiguration of hardware and software, and therefore require significantly less time to deploy andcustomize than MFT software.

Organizations that focus on the data movement requirements of end users is a common andgrowing MFT use-case scenario that spotlights the benefits of cloud MFT services. Large emailattachments, online collaboration, on-premises-to-on-premises data integration and workflow, on-premises-to-cloud integration and vice versa are some of the uses of cloud MFT services. The needto support these use-case scenarios, particularly when the scope of data movement involvesexternal integration scenarios (e.g., mobile, multidivision, cloud or e-commerce) has promptedmany MFT vendors to increasingly offer cloud MFT services as an alternative delivery model in theirapplication infrastructure portfolio.

In addition to core capabilities, including the ability to secure files in transit and at rest, reportingand auditing file activity, common additional cloud MFT services features include datatransformation, mobile device integration, and security and intrusion detection. Deployments caninvolve separately deployed server, client, proxy and plug-in functionality, but are usually deployedas a suite (see "Taxonomy, Definitions and the Vendor Landscape for Application IntegrationSolutions, 2011"). These services are based on robust, attack-resistant platforms and provide highlevels of activity logging.

Many companies benefit from hybrid deployments, whereby a combination of on-premises MFTsoftware and cloud MFT services are used to address various scenarios dealing with internal andexternal interactions such as using MFT on-premises for handling internal file transfer (application toapplication); and cloud MFT services for handling B2B transactions and other incoming andoutgoing file transfers, such as B2B commerce, email attachments, cloud integration, file sharingand FTP.

Nevertheless, the cloud MFT services market is still maturing, with market leaders andmegavendors working toward offering all the functionality found in on-premises solutions. Cloudservices offerings in the MFT vendor market have continued to grow in the last 12 months, withmost new offerings addressing ad hoc or user initiated file transfers. However, the definition ofcloud MFT services must distinguish between the PaaS and software as a service (SaaS) MFTofferings. Some MFT vendors package and market their cloud services offerings as SaaS, others asPaaS. PaaS is typically sold to IT, and SaaS to lines of business. Here we discuss only the cloudMFT offerings that are deemed by Gartner to be a programmable application infrastructure (andtherefore a PaaS). Some other cloud MFT service offerings, omitted here, fall into the businessapplication services (SaaS) category. Gartner still expects that, by 2014, virtually all MFT vendorswill offer either cloud MFT services or cloud-enabled MFT products (see "When to Use MFT SaaSVersus MFT PaaS").




While cloud MFT services adoption is increasing substantially year over year, it is still earlymainstream. But given the wide range of cloud MFT services use-case scenarios, its increasingavailability and maturity, and commercial appeal (in the context of macro cloud and PaaS adoptionfactors), we expect that the adoption of cloud MFT services will accelerate over the next few years.

User Advice: Organizations should look to cloud MFT services for ease of provisioning and abilityto scale to meet demands, particularly when data movement extends beyond the enterprise. Otherreasons for choosing cloud MFT services include:

■ Lack of upfront software licensing costs

■ No new investment for additional infrastructure (hardware, operating system, etc.)

■ Bundled services

■ Operation and support outsourced to vendor

These are just a few important factors that organizations should look for when considering cloudMFT services.

Enterprises with on-premises MFT often find that a hybrid approach is the appropriate architecturedue to investments and integrations already made. Additional features to look for from MFT vendorsare the ability to support application-to-application integration, existing middleware, APIs fordevelopment, and reporting and monitoring.

Organizations looking for highly secure MFT solutions should view cloud MFT services offeringswith some caution, as some offerings lack documented security procedures (see "Consider SecurityImplications When Choosing Between MFT PaaS and On-Premises MFT Solutions").

Business Impact: MFT is a vital tool for reliable and secure exchange of data. The impact of notusing such a tool can lead to business process failures, data security breaches, failed compliance/regulatory audits (for example, Basel II, Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), FederalInformation Security Management Act (FISMA), Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Health InsurancePortability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCIDSS) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) and even loss of business. Organizations with limited ITinfrastructure and skills that are looking for rapid deployment and incremental on-demandscalability will find cloud MFT services to be cost competitive and highly flexible, and therefore aviable alternative to on-premises MFT software for managing the transfer of data internally andexternally. Cautionary note: Organizations dealing with international trade should fully understandwhere the data resides with a provider and who can access the data while it is stored in the cloud.The data can be backed up or stored in a country where laws and regulations are different than theorganization's home country.



Maturity: Adolescent




Sample Vendors: Accellion; Axway; Biscom; Box.net; Cleo; Cyber-Ark Software; DataMotion;EasyLink Services International; GlobalScape; GXS; IBM; Ipswitch; Liaison Technologies;Seeburger; Thru; Tibco Software


"Cloud MFT Services Offer Opportunities to Enhance Applications for Ease of Access to BusinessInformation"

"When to Use MFT SaaS Versus MFT PaaS"

"Know When to Consider the Cloud to Extend Your On-Premises MFT Capabilities and Capacity"

"How, When and Why to Use Cloud MFT Services as a PaaS Tool for Application Integration"

"Four Common User Scenarios That Demand MFT"

Cloud-Enabled Application Platform (CEAP)

Analysis By: Yefim V. Natis

Definition: Cloud-enabled application platforms (CEAPs) are software products centered onapplication server functionality and designed to power private or public cloud application platformas a service (aPaaS). CEAP's features enable elastic multitenancy and other cloud characteristics(e.g., horizontal scalability, use tracking and tenant self-service). A CEAP can also serve as asoftware platform for cloud application software as a service (SaaS). Many CEAP vendors use thetechnology to offer their own public aPaaS.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: CEAPs are bought by IT organizations building privateaPaaS, by cloud services providers building public aPaaS, by some independent software vendors(ISVs) building SaaS application services or by system integrators (SIs) building private or publiccloud-based applications for their customers. CEAP technology powers every SaaS offering, butmost do not offer that technology as a product.

Many vendors, including IBM, Pivotal and Red Hat, are offering CEAP technology today (see"Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013"). Oracle-led JavaCommunity Process plans to add cloud enabling to a future version of Java Platform, EnterpriseEdition (Java EE 8), aiming to make the certified Java EE application servers into CEAPs, as well(although timing of this is uncertain and likely beyond four years away from production usability).

As enterprise interest in private platform as a service (PaaS) increases and the CEAP offerings fromwell-regarded software vendors become available, the momentum of CEAP increases, as well. Still,the potential users of CEAPs are not yet fully engaged in the market, because:

■ Many private cloud projects are still focused on just the infrastructure as a service (IaaS)technologies and deploy precloud platform middleware there, forming private "IaaS plusmiddleware" platforms.




■ Lack of standards causes many potential users to delay adoption.

■ Many smaller ISVs are choosing aPaaS, rather than the CEAP route, delegating to the PaaSprovider all of the infrastructure responsibilities.

■ Some larger ISVs are still developing their own cloud-enabling capabilities, because they seethe CEAP offerings as immature or high-risk.

Cloud or not, it makes good sense for an application server platform to support elastic use ofresources and mixed application loads. During the next three to five years, most traditionalapplication servers will adopt some cloud-style characteristics and become CEAPs (although thedepth of cloud functionality will vary). Many IT organizations, looking to build effective privateaPaaS, will seek the cloud characteristics in their application platforms. Support of cloudcharacteristics will become a checklist item on RFPs and platform technology evaluation lists. Allthese trends are pushing CEAP toward the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

User Advice:

■ IT organizations looking to build private-cloud-based applications or create a private applicationPaaS should examine available CEAP as the application platform of choice.

■ Technology providers looking to offer a public aPaaS should examine available CEAP as anapplication platform of choice to facilitate such cloud service.

■ ISVs seeking to offer SaaS while retaining control over the technology stack underlying theapplication software should examine available CEAP as the application platform of choice.

■ Technology providers and IT organizations seeking to develop their own implementation ofcloud-enabled application platform will avoid third-party CEAP software in favor of their owndesigns, but may consider the exception of open-source CEAP that can be used a startingpoint for a custom platform design.

All prospects looking to build or deploy a cloud business application service while delegating mostof the cloud-enabling and cloud infrastructure management to cloud providers should avoidconsideration of CEAP software products and examine available aPaaS services instead.

Business Impact: The broad adoption of CEAP will improve the efficiency of business software andwill make cloud-style computing a common model for both private and public software services.Platform vendors will have a new (cloud-enabled) generation of technology to upsell to theircustomers. Users will operate their business software with greater efficiency. Vendors with themost-advanced CEAPs are likely to offer the most-advanced aPaaS. Vendors that can establish astandard programming model for CEAPs (now absent) will have a major advantage over theircompetitors in industry influence, in the forming of partner ecosystems and, consequently, ingrowth opportunities for their business.



Maturity: Emerging




Sample Vendors: Apprenda; Cordys; GigaSpaces Technologies; IBM; Pivotal; Red Hat; Rollbase;Servoy; Software AG; Techcello; WSO2


"Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"


"What IT leaders Need To Know About Application PaaS Models and Use Patterns"



"Understanding Tenancy: Salesforce.com Versus Google.com"

"Gartner aPaaS Report Card: Choose Your Cloud Application Platform Wisely"

Portal PaaS

Analysis By: Jim Murphy

Definition: A portal platform as a service (PaaS) is a cloud-based multitenant offering thatenterprises can use to build, deliver and maintain cloud-based portals. Portals are personalized,unified points of access to relevant information, business processes and people. They use a pageframework and visual component construct to aggregate and deliver a variety of content,applications and composites. A portal PaaS includes cohesive services for managing security,personalization, content and integration in the context of portals.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Enterprise portal frameworks can embrace the cloudin five ways (see "Five Ways the Cloud Is Rolling Into the Enterprise Portal Market"):

■ Cloud-friendly portals

■ Portal PaaS

■ Cloud-enabled portal platforms (CEPPs)

■ Private cloud internal use (using a CEPP)

■ Private cloud external use (using a CEPP)

Of these, the portal PaaS represents the greatest potential value to portal customers, the highestpotential for growth and the greatest risk.

Gartner customers have shown increased interest in portal PaaS options during the past year. Themain appeal is faster time to market. Organizations also expect portal PaaS to facilitate portalinitiatives without the unpredictably high costs of supporting data and networking infrastructure.




More-intense requirements to support mobile devices and more bandwidth-intensive content, suchas video, are further inciting organizations to look for portal PaaS offerings.

The portal PaaS market remains hampered by two factors:

■ Horizontal portals require integration with enterprise information sources and applications, mostof remain on-premises. Although there may someday be value in employing cloud-basedplatforms to provide interoperability between cloud-based and on-premises information andapplications, an on-premises portal is more likely to support most interoperability needs today.When enterprises adopt real hybrid topology — part on-premises and part in the cloud in moreor less equal measure — doing portal work in the cloud will not be as illogical, because asignificant portion of resource access will be from the cloud anyway.

■ Horizontal portals are also typically highly customized and, in many cases, serve as afoundation for building, deploying and delivering Web-based applications and composites.Organizations that have dealt with portal migration know that such customization can betroublesome when it's time to upgrade or replace their portal platforms. Cloud portal serviceproviders haven't instilled enough assurance that portal customizations and applications willsurvive when they make upgrades to their infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or PaaS offerings,which serve as the foundation for their portal services. Until the offerings have nonintrusiveversion control and customization, comprehensive portal cloud services will not take off. Thus,traditional on-premises portals will have to be redesigned for cloud deployment.

However, we are starting to see the scales tip in favor of faster portal PaaS adoption. An increase indemand is accompanying the increased confidence in and adoption of cloud-based platforms forcollaboration and a wide range of business applications in adjacent areas, especially in humancapital management (HCM) and CRM, which constitute important systems of record for business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-customer (B2C) portals. The customization/upgrade obstacle isbecoming a driver as vendors offer unintrusive versioning as a core characteristic of their cloudservices. Meanwhile PaaS capability in development, integration and other middleware areas isoffering more feasible and sustainable means to integrate and accomplish custom clouddevelopment.

Portal PaaS has emerged, for many organizations, as the cloud part of a hybrid portal platform whilethe enterprise data remains on-premises. In fact, some essential elements of Generation 7 portals,including Web analytics and context awareness, have their footing in the cloud already. With time,as more data is entrusted to cloud providers, the entire portal platform will begin to move to thecloud.

Portal PaaS offerings continue to emerge. The most notable new offerings among the large vendorsis SAP Hana Cloud Portal (see "SAP Hana Cloud Portal Is a Front End for SAP Innovation").Microsoft's SharePoint Online has also seen a significant update in the wave of SharePoint 2013updates. Specifically, a new cloud-friendly app model introduced in SharePoint 2013 supports threedeployment models for apps: SharePoint-hosted (traditional on-premises), autohosted (hosted inthe Microsoft cloud; offered through the app store) and provider-hosted (hosted by third parties tobe consumed on-premises or in the cloud). These are geared toward allowing more sophisticated




integration and development at the same time as enabling customers to deploy SharePoint in a trueon-premises/cloud hybrid model.

Otherwise, organizations are finding portal PaaS offerings from vendors outside of the traditionalportal establishment. Covisint offers a pioneering and long-standing horizontal portal PaaS. Itsexpertise is helping organizations in industries with complex supply chains — such asmanufacturing, healthcare, financial services and the public sector — manage their B2Brelationships. Salesforce.com continues to emerge as a viable option for cloud-based horizontalportal capability, most recently establishing an anchor for its portal-related efforts in its social-centric Salesforce Communities offering. Among other vendors to watch is eXo, an emerging portalPaaS provider based in France and expanding to other regions, including North America. Itsrecently announced eXo portal PaaS capabilities include a CEPP, a cloud-based integrateddevelopment environment (IDE) and eXo Cloud Workspaces — a social Internet offered as a service— which could evolve into a more thorough, enterprise-class portal PaaS.

User Advice: Organizations should consider the cloud an integral part of their future portalinitiatives, especially as they expand to user experience platforms (UXPs; see "The Emerging UserExperience Platform"), employ software-as-a-service line-of-business applications, IaaS and a widerange of content and context services that can enhance their portals' utility, appeal and overalleffectiveness. However, organizations of significant size won't likely institute portal PaaS as the solefoundation for all of their portal efforts.

Most organizations should prepare for a hybrid cloud/on-premises portal strategy, which could takevarious forms. While there may be much variability in which aspects of portals remain on-premisesand which reside in the cloud, companies must ensure that their portal technologies are equippedto accommodate a range of hybrid models.

Organizations should be cautious about adopting portal PaaS. Integration and customization couldprove difficult and costly during upgrades, and providers must effectively insulate suchcustomizations from changes to underlying PaaS offerings. Ensure that offerings support modernWeb technologies like HTML5/Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3) and RESTful means ofinteroperability.

Organizations should remain wary of customization and integration in most cloud portal serviceinitiatives. Although they can be useful, especially for situations requiring portals as mechanisms forteam and B2B integration, organizations should use out-of-the-box capabilities, includingprepackaged portlets, when possible.

Business Impact: CIOs and their IT organizations stand to benefit greatly from portal PaaS as ameans to respond quickly and efficiently to business needs. Portal PaaS often offers faster time tomarket at a more predictable cost, in line with business value, versus traditional, on-premises portalofferings.

Cloud portal services will emerge as a competitive option during the next five years. Organizationswill find value in cloud portal services, whether as go-to platforms for portals or as part of a




comprehensive hybrid portal strategy that includes on-premises and cloud-based portals andcomponents.



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Covisint; eXo; Microsoft; salesforce.com; SAP


"SAP Hana Cloud Portal Is a Front End for SAP Innovation"

"Five Ways the Cloud Is Rolling Into the Enterprise Portal Market"

"The Rise of Portal Platform as a Service: The Vendor View"

"The Rise of Portal Platform as a Service: The Customer View"

"Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape"

Private PaaS


Definition: Private platform as a service (PaaS) is the rendition of PaaS in a private cloud. PaaS isapplication infrastructure (middleware) functionality offered as a service. Gartner tracks 15functional types of PaaS, although not all are offered as software for a private cloud deployment. Tobuild a private PaaS, an IT organization develops or buys cloud-enabled application infrastructuresoftware, and deploys it over a pool of physical or virtual machines (VMs) in a data center of itschoice.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Most of the discussion of PaaS at this stage of cloudcomputing adoption is focused on the public cloud and a few particular types of the PaaSspectrum, such as aPaaS and iPaaS (see "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and VendorLandscape, 2013"). Most of the discussion of the private cloud is focused on the systeminfrastructure as a service (IaaS), delivering VMs and storage as a private cloud service. However,as initial and typical private cloud implementations (which might be referred to more precisely as"private IaaS") reach maturity, some providers and IT organizations turn their attention to the higherlevel of the stack — the private PaaS.

Many IT organizations invest in the private cloud looking to benefit from cloud computing withoutencountering the perceived risks — security, integrity, reliability, availability, performance and otherchallenges. Regulations and company policies can prevent organizations from entering the publiccloud space as well. Some organizations don't like having a subscription relationship with a vendorwithout owning the software assets, and some prefer to control their IT direction in their own wholly




owned data centers. As long as these obstacles to adoption of public cloud services persist,interest in private cloud computing will continue to grow.

Both the provider and the subscribers in the case of the private PaaS belong to the sameorganization. However, the experience of the subscribers, if the private cloud is implementedcorrectly, is the same as when they subscribe to public cloud services. Private or public — theservices are encapsulated and their internal implementation is hidden from the subscribers. Assuch, private PaaS becomes a stage on the way to adoption of public PaaS as well. It establishes inthe IT organization the culture and the practices of a cloud services consumer: i.e., reliance onreuse of standard services and optimization of use of resources. Once it has become well-adjustedto private PaaS, the organization will experience the use of some public PaaS services as only anincremental change.

Private PaaS can be established in an IT organization by combining a private IaaS environment (amanaged pool of VMs) with a cloud management platform (such as CloudSoft or Tibco SilverFabric) and relevant middleware. However, this approach is complex, requires substantial internalexpertise, and is prone to errors and inefficiencies. Recently some key enterprise software vendors,such as IBM, Red Hat, Pivotal and Software AG, began to offer cloud-enabled software for privatePaaS in addition to their traditional and well-used application infrastructure products. With that, themomentum of adoption of private PaaS is likely to escalate.

User Advice:

■ Invest in a private PaaS as a natural evolution from private IaaS, targeting more standardization,economies of scale, greater agility and productivity, centralized control and optimization of yourmiddleware infrastructure.

■ To establish a private PaaS, select cloud-enabled application infrastructure products. Aim foran environment with self-service at the middleware level with opaque (hidden) underlyingsystem infrastructure. The system infrastructure (such as VMs or physical machines) must bemanaged and visible only by the providers, not by the subscribers of the PaaS services. Simplydeploying middleware on VMs will provide neither of these characteristics.

■ Give preference to cloud-enabled application infrastructure products from vendors that alsooffer public PaaS services using the same software. This will create a foundation for futureexpansion, or transition to the public cloud in a minimally intrusive manner.

■ Before moving to a public or private PaaS, make sure your IT environment is well-versed inservice-oriented architecture (SOA) administration. Adjusting to using cloud applicationresources is similar to building SOA services, because the cloud is an encapsulation of ITservices offered in large part through programmatic SOA-style interfaces.

■ Judge the maturity of the private PaaS implementation by the degree to which it isindistinguishable from a competent public PaaS when seen from the position of a subscriber.

Business Impact: Private PaaS enables organizations concerned with security and quality ofservice in public clouds to begin developing the progressive IT practices associated with cloudcomputing, without exposure to the risks.




For many mainstream IT organizations, the transition to the private cloud is a transformationalchange. Private PaaS is an important step in this transformation. IT organizations that adopt privatePaaS architectures will position themselves to enjoy higher degrees of efficiency of their IToperations, as well as improved productivity, agility and manageability of their informationresources. They will be better prepared to adopt the hybrid combination of the public and privatecloud, expanding their technology utilization options and increasing the scope of the availableinformation-processing resources.



Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Apprenda; Cordys; GigaSpaces Technologies; IBM; Pivotal; Progress Software;Red Hat; Rollbase; Software AG; Techcello; WSO2






At the Peak

bpmPaaS

Analysis By: Michele Cantara

Definition: The term "business process management PaaS (bpmPaaS)" refers to the delivery ofBPM platform capabilities as a cloud service by a service provider. A BPM platform minimallyincludes:

■ A graphical business process and/or rule modeling capability

■ A process registry/repository to handle the modeling metadata

■ A process execution, and either a state management engine and/or a rule engine

Other BPM-enabling technologies (BPMTs), such as ABPD, BAM, BI, CEP, optimization andsimulation, may also be part of the platform, but they are not required.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: bpmPaaS is "middleware as a service" thatcustomers use to build, run, manage and improve their business processes. Business processesare the actual work of a single organization or multiple organizations, and BPM technologies help




manage that work. Business processes include formally defined activities and informal workpractices. Additionally, business processes may involve human and application activities, and theymay be structured or unstructured.

bpmPaaS is often confused with cloud-enabled BPM (CE-BPM) platforms. bpmPaaS refers to thedelivery of BPM technology functionality as a service by a cloud services provider. In contrast, CE-BPM refers to a cloud-enabled BPM product. bpmPaaS and CE-BPM may use the exact sametechnology. The only difference is in the delivery model. bpmPaaS is delivered as a service, and isdirectly consumed as a service. CE-BPM is delivered as a product, and is then used to provide apublic or private cloud service by an external service provider (ESP) or an internal IT organization(see "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013").

Ninety-six percent of organizations surveyed by Gartner in November 2012 indicated that the PaaScapabilities within a software as a service (SaaS) offering were key considerations in their decisionto purchase SaaS. The inability to customize processes is an issue for buyers. Nearly one-third oforganizations that use SaaS see limited customization as a problem, and a major reason for notusing business process as a service includes a lack of process customization to meet business andindustry requirements. Ultimately, bpmPaaS is important to SaaS (and also to business process asa service), since many customers want to be able to customize their applications and processes inthe cloud.

Most new BPM software vendors offer bpmPaaS. For example, three out the five vendors featuredin "Cool Vendors in Business Process Management, 2013" offered their software as bpmPaaS, andnew entrants to the BPM software market always offer bpmPaaS, although they may not offer anon-premises product. Additionally, some vendors are seeing marked shifts in their revenue mix, withmore than 40% of their revenue coming from bpmPaaS in recent quarters (see "Virginia Business''Flying High'" for more). Lastly, major vendors, such as Fujitsu (see Fujitsu's "Fujitsu Acquires CloudService Provider, RunMyProcess"), have acquired bpmPaaS vendors to bolster their BPMcapabilities. BizFlow (formerly HandySoft) introduced a bpmPaaS capability this year, and IBMannounced that BPM 8.5 in the Smart Cloud at IBM Impact 2013 (see "IBM Smarter ProcessExpands to Transform Business Operations").

Because of the importance of process customization in the cloud, and because business processmanagement suite (BPMS) vendors have reported higher growth in bpmPaaS versus on-premisessales, we have moved this entry further toward the peak of the Hype Cycle curve. Similarly,penetration has been expanded to 20% to 50% this year to reflect that most buyers now requireBPM software vendors to have bpmPaaS capabilities, even if the buyer does not intend toimmediately take advantage of it (see "What IT Leaders Need to Know About bpmPaas and Cloud-Enabled BPM Platforms").

Buyers are using bpmPaaS:

■ In pilot projects to build a business case for on-premises BPM solutions

■ In development and test environments to avoid additional capital expenditures on software andhardware


http://www.virginiabusiness.com/index.php/news/article/flying-high/318223

http://www.virginiabusiness.com/index.php/news/article/flying-high/318223

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2013/20130408-01.html

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2013/20130408-01.html



■ As an elastic deployment option to address spiky and unpredictable demand

■ For global deployments involving a hybrid of on-premises BPM in regions with establishedinfrastructure and bpmPaaS in emerging economies

■ To obtain an end-to-end view of business processes spanning partners and suppliers, as wellas multiple cloud services

bpmPaaS is being used for both differentiating and nondifferentiating processes by large andmidsize enterprises. For example, the U.S. Department of Education is now using bpmPaaS to buildand manage process-based solutions that operate in the cloud (see Government Contracting NewWire's "Appian Application Granted ATO by Dept. of Education").

The buying power of business stakeholders has caused a shift in the type of processes used withbpmPaaS. While IT buyers use high-control bpmPaaS for multistep process compositions andworkflow in complex cross-boundary processes, business stakeholders are turning to lighter-weight, high-productivity bpmPaaS to support decisioning, adaptive case management, socialBPM, collaboration and situational applications (see "Productivity vs. Control: Cloud ApplicationPlatforms Must Split to Win"; note: some of the documents referenced in this research have beenarchived; their content may not reflect current conditions). bpmPaaS offerings (such as KofaxTotalAgility) based on a Microsoft platform are especially popular, due to the ubiquity of MicrosoftSharePoint.

Service providers (such as Genpact and Capgemini) incorporate bpmPaaS into their businessprocess outsourcing (BPO) offerings so that they can deliver differentiated, flexible businessprocesses using a one-to-many, process-centric, model-driven platform that goes beyond thelimited application extensions available in process-enhancing technology and services (PETS; see"How to Evaluate Process Agility and Visibility in Cloud Business Process Services"). Cloud servicesbrokerages (CSBs), such as Capgemini Immediate, Talend and Revevol, use bpmPaaS in their CSBintegration and customization roles to develop process-centric, model-driven applications that linkmultiple cloud services together (see "What Types of Model-Driven Applications Are MostAppropriate for a High Pace of Process Change?").

User Advice:

■ Take advantage of BPMS products that are available via bpmPaaS offerings for your BPM pilotprojects. This approach can give you some quick wins that can help build a business case foran on-premises solution or more widespread use of the bpmPaaS approach.

■ If you are evaluating bpmPaaS as an option for hybrid deployment, then limit your search tothose vendors that offer both bpmPaaS and CE-BPM, and use the same technology and thesame code base. This will help minimize testing efforts and simplify maintenance.

■ Beware of vendor lock-in. Understand how easy it will be to move your process artifacts fromone bpmPaaS provider to another.

■ Understand that not all bpmPaaS is equally elastic. Only half of the vendors offering bpmPaaSfeature an automated mechanism for handling elasticity. The other half of the vendors require


http://www.govconwire.com/2010/08/appian-application-granted-ato-by-dept-of-education



the customer to provide some sort of advance notification to increase or decrease servicecapacity.

■ Plan your budget with the understanding that, even when "elasticity" is automated, it's usuallyonly automated to increase, rather than decrease. As a result, your payments may stay thesame, even though your consumption decreases.

■ As with many PaaS offerings, bpmPaaS vendors may require minimum terms of service, usually12 months. Early terminations result in the forfeiture of the remaining contract value. Factor thecontract length into your total-cost-of-ownership analysis.

Business Impact: bpmPaaS will produce high benefits to businesses, particularly to midmarketcompanies that previously could not afford or lacked the bandwidth to support on-premises BPMsolutions. bpmPaaS will also help larger enterprises move as much application infrastructure aspossible into the cloud to avoid the capital expense of deploying it on premises. As a result, moreorganizations can use these tools to improve business processes by making them visible to allprocess stakeholders. This trend will be further strengthened by the expansion of enterprise valuechains involving multiple partners. Enterprises will need to manage end-to-end business processesacross multiple organizations in the value chain. These cross-enterprise processes have no singlelocation and no real requirement for on-premises BPM. As a result, bpmPaaS is a more naturaloption for these efforts.

bpmPaaS vendors typically do not offer infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but when they do, theyare more likely to be a traditional IT services provider already (for example IBM and Fujitsu).However, most software vendors that offer bpmPaaS partner with an ESP for hosting. The mostcommon hosting partners are Amazon, followed by Windows Azure and Rackspace. bpmPaaS isalso spurring the development of CSBs, such as Capgemini Immediate, which hosts a bpmPaaS(Cordys), provides custom application development services through its consulting arm and alsoprovides custom managed services for ongoing support of the solution. In this way, bpmPaaS willhelp reshape the IT service value chain with regards to application and business process services.




Sample Vendors: Adeptia; Appian; AppPoint Software Solutions; AuraPortal; BizFlow; BP Logix;Cordys; Fujitsu; IBM (Blueworks Live); Integrify; Interneer; Knowesia; Pegasystems; PNMsoft;Questetra; RunMyProcess; Software AG; Sparkling Logic; Tibco Software; Vitria; XMPro


"What IT Leaders Need to Know About bpmPaas and Cloud-Enabled BPM Platforms"





"Gartner Position: BPM Is Critical for the Adoption of Applications and Business Processes in theCloud"

"Cool Vendors in Business Process Management, 2013"

"Predicts 2013: Platform as a Service Takes on More IT Responsibilities"

"Four Best Practices for Customization Brokerage of Business Processes in the Cloud"


Integration PaaS (iPaaS)


Definition: iPaaS is a cloud services suite that provides a platform to support application, data andprocess integration projects, usually involving a combination of cloud services (i.e., cloud-basedapplications or Web APIs) and on-premises systems. iPaaS delivers a combination of capabilitiesthat is typically found in ESBs, data integration tools, B2B gateways, managed file transfer productsand governance platforms. IT departments leverage these capabilities to develop, execute andmanage integration interfaces in the cloud.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The integration platform as a service (iPaaS) market isemerging from the convergence of multiple technology segments: cloud services integration (CSI),e-commerce B2B integration, API management, PaaS and traditional application and dataintegration middleware (see "What IT Leaders Need to Know About Integration PaaS for CloudServices Integration (and More)").

Furthermore, iPaaS functionality is increasingly provided as "embedded" features in broader cloudservices, such as software as a service (SaaS), other PaaS offerings and possibly infrastructure as aservice (IaaS). Moreover, B2B specialists that deliver integration brokerages (IBs) and cloud servicesbrokerages (CSBs) sometimes provide iPaaS features for their own use in IT service offerings (see:"Benefits and Drawbacks of iPaaS as an 'Embedded' Feature of Cloud Services"). Over the pastfive years, many organizations, especially small and midsize, have successfully used iPaaS offeringsfor basic CSI projects because of their simplicity, ease of use and affinity with the SaaS model. Butover the past 12 months, several Global 2000-class organizations have approached iPaaS, primarilyin the wake of SaaS adoption, to support increasingly complex use cases. However, some userorganizations have also adopted iPaaS as a replacement for traditional, on-premises enterpriseservice buses (ESBs) for internal integration. Emerging use cases for iPaaS include publication andmanagement of Web APIs, mobile application integration and machine-to-machine scenarios.

The growing popularity of iPaaS has prompted the emergence of new vendors and has garneredthe attention of established application infrastructure vendors concerning this opportunity; thesevendors have entered (or have plans to enter) the market via acquisitions (for example, IBM'sacquisition of Cast Iron), cloud renditions of their established platforms (for example, Informatica,MuleSoft, Pervasive Software, Tibco Software and Software AG) or new developments (Microsoftand SAP). In the future, iPaaS features will also be incorporated in broader PaaS offerings, which




will also include application PaaS (aPaaS), business process management (BPM) PaaS, databaseplatforms as a service (dbPaaSs) and other services.

These factors will drive adoption of iPaaS functionality, especially in small and midsize organizationsas well as in the departments and business units of large organizations with minimal investmentsand skills in traditional integration platforms.

A number of factors limit iPaaS adoption, including market fragmentation (in this space, Gartnertracks over 20 vendors and counting), lack of skills and industry best practices, and lack of trust in anew paradigm (for example, because of security, privacy and availability concerns as well as anxietyabout ownership of and access to integration development assets that are stored in the cloud).These concerns are compounded by still-limited industry experience in the use of iPaaS for moretraditional internal application, data integration and SOA scenarios. These factors are especiallyprevalent among large organizations with established investments in traditional integration platformsthat have comparatively less SaaS use and that see iPaaS only as an in-the-cloud rendition of theintegration infrastructure that they already have.

However, as adoption of SaaS and other cloud services grows, iPaaS will become a commonlyused integration platform by large organizations as part of a balanced set of integration tools thatincludes traditional on-premises platforms and outsourcing services, such as IB.

User Advice: Compelling iPaaS value propositions for user organizations include the financialbenefits (operating expenditures vs. capital expenditures) that are typical of cloud services, fastertime to integration and greater ease of use compared with traditional integration middleware andthe set of cohesive and integrated capabilities that were previously found in multiple discreteintegration products.

User organizations should seriously consider the adoption of iPaaS as a complementary approachto traditional middleware to support CSI and other externally focused integration requirements (forexample, e-commerce B2B or Web API enablement) for faster time to deployment and lower IToperation costs, especially if their established on-premises integration platforms don't support therequired adapters, message formats, communication protocols and other specific capabilities.However, such an approach will imply incremental complexity due to the additional skills that arerequired and to the need of managing and federating different integration platforms.

The use of iPaaS for certain internal applications or data integration requirements can also beconsidered by user organizations. Most iPaaS offerings provide the capabilities that are required tosupport classic internal application and data integration requirements. iPaaS ease of use and fasttime to integration characteristics and the range of deployment options that are available (see"iPaaS Expands Beyond Cloud Service Integration Through Flexible Deployment Topologies") arealso appealing when it comes to supporting medium-complexity, classic application-to-applicationprojects. Security and performance issues are inhibitors to iPaaS adoption in the most demandinginternal integration scenarios, although it may be an ideal approach for lightweight integration, forintegration of remote locations (for example, branch offices and stores), and for SOA federationrequirements, even though most iPaaS offerings still provide minimal support for governancerequirements. However, at this stage, most iPaaS offerings may prove inadequate to support the




most complex and demanding integration requirements for which on-premises integration platformsremain the most proven option (see "How to Identify the Right Basic Approach for Your ApplicationIntegration Project").

User organizations should consider iPaaS as a low-cost, easy-to-use option for experimental andinnovative scenarios that require integration. Examples include integration of mobile applicationswith SaaS and enterprise applications, machine-to-machine scenarios and composite applicationsin the cloud that combine on-premises and cloud-based application services in the processes anduser interfaces of SaaS applications. iPaaS offerings may provide low-cost and easy-to-usealternatives to traditional integration platforms for these requirements, which often emerge in low-budget, time-constrained and opportunistically oriented projects. But for organizations withmoderate-complexity integration requirements, iPaaS could prove to be a viable alternative totraditional on-premises integration platforms and for a wide spectrum of requirements.

For most large organizations, the coexistence of multiple iPaaS and traditional on-premisesapplication infrastructures will be the norm. Therefore, established integration competency centers,SOA centers of excellence (COEs) and data integration teams should plan to extend their skills andgovernance processes to support the federation of their established integration platforms and newiPaaS offerings.

Business Impact: By using iPaaS offerings, user organizations can quickly and cost-effectivelyintegrate the business processes that encompass cloud services and on-premises applicationswithout acquiring, deploying and managing complex and expensive integration platforms. This willhelp CIOs and IT leaders to reduce the time to deployment of new business applications, toincrease the efficiency of business processes, to better and more deeply integrate with theirbusiness partners, and to control on-premises IT costs (especially in midsize organizations and forprojects in departments, subsidiaries and business units of large organizations). The state-of-the-artapplication and data integration approaches that are currently used only by large organizations willbecome accessible to a broad spectrum of organizations, enabling them to improve the quality andagility of their business processes.




Sample Vendors: AppPoint Software Solutions; Dell Boomi; Fujitsu; IBM-Cast Iron; Informatica;Jitterbit; Microsoft; MuleSoft; Pervasive Software; Skyvva; Software AG; Talend; Tibco Software;WSO2


"What IT Leaders Need to Know About Integration PaaS for Cloud Services Integration (and More)"

"iPaaS Expands Beyond Cloud Service Integration Through Flexible Deployment Topologies"

"Benefits and Drawbacks of iPaaS as an 'Embedded' Feature of Cloud Services"




"What IT Leaders Need to Know About Cloud Services Integration: Proactively Address theChallenge"

"Refresh Your Practices, Governance and Technologies to Tackle Cloud Services Integration"

"How to Identify the Right Basic Approach for Your Application Integration Project"

Platform as a Service (PaaS)


Definition: A platform as a service (PaaS) offering, usually depicted in cloud diagrams between theSaaS layer and the integration as a service (IaaS) layer, is application infrastructure (middleware)services "in the sky." Gartner tracks 15 function-specific types of PaaS, including application,integration and database PaaS. Most of the attention has been on the public renderings ofapplication PaaS like Force.com, while most other forms of PaaS and the private PaaS are onlybeginning to emerge as subjects of strategic discussion and investment.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: In prior years, most of the attention in cloudcomputing was focused on SaaS (e.g., salesforce.com CRM). Recently, the emphasis has been oninfrastructure as a service (IaaS; e.g., Amazon Web Services), including the private cloud renditionof IaaS (often referred to as just private cloud). However, as leading software vendors adjust theirlong-term strategies to reflect the emerging importance of cloud computing to their customer basesand prospects, they are investing to establish a leadership position in PaaS, the middle layer of thecloud architecture and the foundation of the cloud-based applications. More than 130 vendors(mostly small innovators) deliver some form of a PaaS service (see "Platform as a Service:Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013"). By the middle of 2013, all leading applicationinfrastructure (middleware) vendors have some production PaaS offerings. (Many have just begunoffering general availability, and some were in beta with their initial PaaS at the start of 2013.) Mostvendors begin by offering application platform as a service (aPaaS) and database platform as aservice (dbPaaS). Integration, business process management and other middleware services follow.The market dynamics around PaaS that is both promoted and misunderstood by many users and ITleaders keeps PaaS at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

Users turn to PaaS (instead of on-premises deployed middleware) with the expectation of greaterproductivity, lower costs of operation and faster time to results. Many look to benefit from access tostate-of-the-art data center and middleware technologies and operations (which small or midsizebusinesses [SMBs] and many large organizations cannot afford or lack the talent to handle). Someturn to PaaS to establish an independent service provider that avoids the internal and externalpolitical issue of trust. Choosing an independent third-party intermediary often helps overcome trustissues among parties. Users also choose PaaS for its ability to support rapid continuous versioningof software, simplified self-service management and administration, and the expected competitivepace of innovation by PaaS providers. Often, PaaS offerings are chosen just because they are thebest tool for a job (e.g., aPaaS to extend the related SaaS; an integration platform as a service[iPaaS] to address cloud services integration).




The process of establishing the platform architecture and standards for PaaS is in its early stages.Most leading vendors are still developing their insights into cloud computing while investing inbackward-portability with on-premises skills and programming models. IBM, Oracle, Red Hat andMicrosoft are all in this category. As a result, there is more talk about available PaaS offerings frommajor vendors than on their proven capabilities.

Consolidation is on the rise and new vendors are entering the market: Tibco Software announcedTibco Cloud, Software AG acquired LongJump and announced Software AG Live, ProgressSoftware acquired RollBase, and GE joined EMC and VMware in Pivotal, to name the most notablerecent newcomers. Users of IaaS + middleware arrangements (see "What IT Leaders Need to KnowAbout Application PaaS Models and Use Patterns") are discovering the limitations of this approachand turn their attention to PaaS. This is particularly notable with private cloud, where most of theinvestment so far stopped at the IaaS+ level. Although historically most of the attention was focusedon aPaaS offerings, iPaaS has been gaining strong adoption and recognition in 2013 as users adoptSaaS and face the challenge of cloud services integration.

Notable new vendors, increasing presence of the software industry megavendors and confusiontypical of immature, but promising, markets keep PaaS at the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

User Advice:

■ Recognize that PaaS can provide application platform, integration, business processmanagement, portal, database management, in-memory data grids, event processing and othermiddleware services. The PaaS market can be as diverse in functionality as the traditionalmiddleware market, but few vendors are able to offer a comprehensive all-inclusive andintegrated PaaS offering. Examine available functionality against your project requirementswhen evaluating PaaS offerings.

■ Understand that different categories of PaaS (xPaaS) are chosen for different reasons. You willnot be buying a general all-inclusive PaaS, but you always will be buying a particular specializedkind of PaaS (xPaaS), suitable for the type of problem you are addressing.

■ Understand that PaaS offerings are at varying stages of development in maturity, functionalcompleteness and cloud characteristics. PaaS providers' plans (road maps) are subject tochange as the market evolves and matures. Select PaaS services for their present merits,carefully matching their functionality and service levels with the requirements of the projects.

■ Build applications using PaaS to gain expertise in this important emerging area of technology.The applications built using today's PaaS should be designed for ROI within the next two tothree years, to provide organizations with the flexibility to transition to more mature PaaSofferings as they emerge. Massive projects that cannot deliver ROI in a limited time shouldeither not be committed to PaaS at this time or should be divided into smaller components,some of which may be built on PaaS.

■ Consider aPaaS for developing cloud-native applications. Consider iPaaS for cloud servicesintegration. Both categories of PaaS are growing fast and are central to the successful transitionof IT organizations to cloud and hybrid computing.




■ Give preference to vendors that are more likely to accumulate comprehensive PaaS offeringswhen engaged in long-term planning. Unlike on-premises — where users can take a best-of-breed approach to selecting component technologies from different vendors — in the cloud, thewinning scenario will be where many platform requirements of an application are provided inone data center network from one cloud provider.

Business Impact: A prerequisite for leadership in software infrastructure markets has been avendor's ability to take a leading role in establishing the prevailing programming models andarchitectures for software developers. This role enabled vendors to build ecosystems of partners,and a leading ecosystem amounted to sustainable industry leadership. Analogously, leadership inthe PaaS market will require leadership in the evolution of standards, architectures and bestpractices in cloud application platforms and application services. IT megavendors, such as Fujitsu,Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, salesforce.com and SAP, are strategically invested in this market.

During the next five years, reliable and functionally rich PaaS offerings from industry-leadingproviders will alter the business of engineering, integrating and delivering software to enterprisesand consumers. A mature, functional, always-on, high-productivity PaaS will form the foundation fora wave of innovation in business application services, as independent software vendors turn theirengineering efforts to these platforms. Beyond that time frame, new levels of agility, resourcesharing, ubiquitous access, quality of service and the productivity of software engineering willchange the way IT organizations plan and develop software, the kinds of skills they'll require, andhow they'll be managed, evaluated and budgeted. The cloud-native PaaS will lead to new cloud-native business applications that cannot be delivered at justifiable costs today.

With PaaS enterprise, IT has an opportunity to refocus from software infrastructure to differentiatedbusiness services and to become more responsive; however, the cost of IT will not decline. Instead,it will be rearranged, with more spending going to cloud services providers and brokerages, andmore internal IT spending on the composition of user-facing business solutions, management andintegration. Full-scale internal custom engineering will be limited to highly differentiating specializedlegacy application systems. Many businesses will become consumers and providers of cloudservices, expanding their IT perspective from inward-looking enterprise class to outward-facingglobal class. Hybrid computing will become the norm, challenging architectures and organization ofenterprise IT.

Benefit Rating: Transformational


Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: CloudBees; Cordys; Dell Boomi; Engine Yard; GigaSpaces; Gnubila; Google;IBM; Informatica; Microsoft; Pegasystems; Pivotal; salesforce.com; Software AG; Tibco Software;WSO2









IaaS+

Analysis By: Yefim V. Natis; David Mitchell Smith

Definition: IaaS+ is infrastructure as a service (IaaS) bundled with ("plus") middleware and/orapplication software (typically not cloud-enabled). IaaS+ offers middleware capability as a service,the same as platform as a service (PaaS), but, unlike PaaS, it requires that the subscriber managethe underlying service resources (VMs) and arrange elastic sharing of resources. With PaaS,elasticity is built-in and VMs are hidden. IaaS+ is often presented as PaaS, but lacks PaaScharacteristics. It is not PaaS.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: IaaS providers offer multiple forms of IaaS plusmiddleware. The simplest case is illustrated by Amazon Machine Images (AMI) technology. Theoffering may include a bundled basic (not cloud-enabled) DBMS or an application server, butrequires that customers purchase the middleware license from the product vendor and alsosubscribe to the carrying IaaS. The customer gets to use middleware that is hosted over IaaSresources, but gets no PaaS experience or benefits (such as reduced complexity, increasedproductivity or built-in elasticity on-demand). The use of such AMI-style IaaS+ arrangements hasbeen available for several years. In addition, users can subscribe to IaaS services, acquiremiddleware licenses and deploy the middleware on the IaaS-based VMs (a "bring your own license"model) to achieve the same effect.

A more advanced form of IaaS+ has the same IaaS with installed basic middleware, plus cloudmanagement platform (CMP) software (such as the Cloudsoft application management platform orTibco Silver Fabric) to facilitate auto-scaling. This pattern supports shared-hardware elasticity on-demand (if the middleware in question is horizontally scalable), but the subscriber is still responsiblefor selecting, budgeting, deploying and managing the CMP. This is a "build your own elasticity"model. Again, subscribers looking for full control of the software stack will find this a benefit andothers — a burden.

The growing and more confusing form of IaaS+ is an offering such as Amazon Web Services (AWS)Elastic Beanstalk where an IaaS vendor bundles some open-source middleware (Apache Tomcat, inthis case) and support for some elasticity on-demand (CloudWatch and Auto Scaling, in this case).Such an offering packages the capabilities of a PaaS, but not to the experience. The buyer is stillsubscribing to an extended IaaS offering.

IaaS+ is not a PaaS, even if users get access to middleware services from IaaS+ and PaaS. Userssubscribing to PaaS services are freed from the requirement to manage the underlying system'sresources (some optional control of VMs may be available for high-control projects). In contrast tomost users of PaaS, the stack is fully opaque. Only the PaaS (middleware) services are exposedand managed. The internal machinery is fully managed by the provider on behalf of the user.




Subscribers are not required to have any expertise in systems infrastructure technologies or inenabling resource elasticity.

IaaS+, especially its more advanced forms that include a CMP for shared-hardware elasticity, is thepreferred choice for some high-control projects, but it lacks the full experience of a PaaS.

As more users gain experience with the IaaS+ model, it will become evident that most of thecomplexity and cost of managing a traditional IT environment will not reduce the costs orcomplexity under IaaS+ services. Organizations that are looking to the cloud for greater productivityand relief from system-level resource management turn to PaaS. Nevertheless, we expect theleading IaaS vendors to continue to add IaaS+ offerings to their portfolios, pushing the modelfurther toward the Peak of Inflated Expectations.

User Advice:

■ Choose IaaS plus middleware when you want to retain control over system infrastructureresources, such as VMs and storage, and you are prepared to maintain the required in-houseexpertise.

■ Ensure that the IaaS+ offering you choose has the elastic multitenancy support if you need it (orbe prepared to develop it).

■ Choose a PaaS if you are looking for reduced complexity and increased cloud-designproductivity for your application development or integration projects.

■ Ensure that applications developed and deployed with the use of IaaS+ achieve their ROItargets within the next two to three years, enabling you to re-evaluate the choice between IaaSplus middleware and PaaS.

Business Impact: IaaS+ is a step toward higher functioning cloud infrastructure services. Its limitedplatform efficiency and productivity is matched by a greater degree of control over the operatingenvironment that is available to the developers and users of applications using IaaS+ (comparedwith PaaS). Some advanced users will take advantage of the extra levels of control in IaaS+ andbuild advanced solutions, including some PaaS offerings powered by the internal IaaS plusmiddleware services. For most mainstream IT organizations that use IaaS+, it will serve as the initialstep toward PaaS.




Sample Vendors: Amazon Web Services; IBM; Oracle; Red Hat


"Understand IaaS, PaaS and the Role of Middleware to Make the Most of Each"





"Competitive Landscape: New Entrants to the Cloud IaaS Market Face Tough CompetitiveChallenges"


Application PaaS (aPaaS)


Definition: Application platform as a service (aPaaS) offers application development and clouddeployment services. It is an application server and composite application platform "in the sky," andis one of many functional types of PaaS, although it is often erroneously described as beingsynonymous with all of PaaS. An aPaaS is always integrated or linked with a database system,which may or may not be also offered as a cloud data store service (dbPaaS).

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: In 2013, more than 35 vendors offer some form of anaPaaS ("Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013"). Industrymegavendors and small innovators compete in this new market. The offerings run the gamut ofmultitenancy types, from shared hardware to shared everything (see "Gartner Reference Model forElasticity and Multitenancy"). Many are targeting the high-productivity market, and some arefocusing on the high-control market (see "Productivity vs. Control: Cloud Application PlatformsMust Split to Win"). At the start of 2013 most leading application infrastructure vendors have begunoffering production aPaaS. The trial time for the market, its vendors and its subscribers is 2013. Themegavendors will assess their ability to compete, and the users will examine the vendors' ability todeliver on many expectations of the benefits of cloud computing.

The process of establishing the platform architecture and standards for aPaaS remains in its earlystages. Most leading application infrastructure vendors are still developing their insights into cloudcomputing and are investing first in backward-compatibility with on-premises skills andprogramming models (at the expense of some cloud characteristics). The resulting aPaaS offeringsare either slow in coming (prolonged betas and limited availability), come from small providers witha limited ability to execute or are proprietary. Some users deploy traditional platform middlewareover an infrastructure as a service (IaaS)-like Amazon EC2 and, mistakenly, consider that aninstance of an aPaaS (see "What IT Leaders Need to Know About Application PaaS Models andUse Patterns"). Confusion in the mainstream enterprise IT about the nature of aPaaS delays theonset of maturity in understanding and using aPaaS to its best capability, and it prolongs the periodof hype.

The market perception of aPaaS is influenced by two conflicting trends. Users choose aPaaS,instead of the traditional on-premises application server environment, expecting higher productivity,faster time to results, ease of self-service management, escape from never-ending version controlissues, lower entry costs and lower total costs. However, many of these benefits remain hard toachieve. For example, users looking for backward-compatibility find that aPaaS does notsignificantly improve productivity, while users looking for high productivity find that aPaaS requirestraining and new skills. The entry of the major software vendors (e.g., Oracle and IBM) into the




aPaaS market, the new plans announced by some hardware vendors(e.g., Dell and HP), theacquisitions by vendors (e.g., Software AG and Progress), all feed the industry news (and hype)mills. And, although users are sometimes misled into false aPaaS (IaaS+middleware), or choose thewrong type of aPaaS and are disappointed — the hype and anticipation for the future of aPaaSremain high.

User Advice:

■ Large-enterprise IT organizations using traditional on-premises software may achieve greaterdegrees of uniqueness, availability, performance and security for mission-critical applicationsthan what is offered by aPaaS providers. However, for projects that need to be completedquickly, the aPaaS option offers rapid initiation of projects and, often, fast value delivery as well

■ Users should build applications using aPaaS to gain expertise in this important and emergingarea of technology. However, the applications built using today's aPaaS should be designed forROI within the next two to three years to provide organizations with the flexibility to transition tomore mature aPaaS offerings as they become available.

■ Most users should plan for a hybrid environment, and should ensure that their applicationintegration infrastructure — including the possible use of integration platform as a service(iPaaS) — is prepared to manage on-premises, private PaaS and public aPaaS-based cloudapplication services.

■ Application independent software vendors (ISVs), especially smaller startup ISVs, should look atthe aPaaS opportunity as a serious long-term, game-changing option. Its low cost of entry, lowburden of operations and, often, high degree of productivity and scale enable less-technicalapplication ISVs to concentrate on their business expertise and leave the IT issues to others.

■ IT organizations that are not ready to use aPaaS, but anticipate its use in the future, shouldinvest in developing a competent infrastructure environment for service-oriented architecture(SOA). Cloud services are exposed to subscribers in part through SOA-style interfaces, and awell-functioning SOA platform can begin to adopt aPaaS and SaaS as a gradual andincremental change. Without an SOA background, the transition to cloud computing will facehigher costs and reduced initial value. These organizations may consider adopting private PaaSas an initial step toward the adoption of public cloud aPaaS.

Business Impact: As a new model for developing business solutions and delivering the businessvalue of IT, aPaaS affects the business of enterprise IT, ISVs, system integrators (SIs) and othertechnology vendors. IT organizations transitioning to the use of PaaS and aPaaS should review thestructure of their IT budgets, their policies and practices, the required IT skills and the relationshipwith technology providers, and the cooperation between their line-of-business and IT organizations.The models of calculating and managing costs change as well. Vendors are learning new kinds ofbusiness relationships with their customers, and the cost, revenue and margin calculations arechanging as well. Along with other forms of PaaS and SaaS, aPaaS brings a new IT model toenterprises and technology vendors across industries and geographies.






Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Appistry; CloudBees; Cordys; Engine Yard; Google; Microsoft; Pivotal; Red Hat;salesforce.com; Software AG; Wolf Frameworks; WSO2






"Gartner aPaaS Report Card: Choose Your Cloud Application Platform Wisely"

Sliding Into the Trough



Definition: With multitenancy, a common computing environment supports logically isolatedapplication instances (tenants).The degree of isolation must be complete, but the degree of physicalsharing of resources varies. The tenants can be multiple organizations using one multitenantapplication or just multiple applications competing for shared underlying resources. Multitenancy iselastic when resources are redistributed among tenants in response to changing demand withoutinterruption of service.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Elastic multitenancy enables the providers of cloudservices to balance the use of enabling computing resources among customers, thus increasingresource utilization and reducing the cost of operations. The concept of multitenancy has beenpopularized by software as a service (SaaS) providers that gain the additional benefits of ease ofversion control, centralization of control and reduced heterogeneity of resources when usingmultitenancy (compared with hosting each customer in isolated dedicated environments). SaaSproviders favor the high-density packing of servers offered by the cloud-native fine-grained, shared-container multitenancy (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"). However,elastic sharing of resources among tenant instances can make the isolation of tenants difficult.Many vendors that are bringing the precloud on-premises middleware to their cloud offerings haveto resort to the cloud-based shared-hardware multitenancy, which reduces the benefits of sharingto retain the precloud enterprise middleware architecture.

The minimal multitenancy is shared-nothing ("isolated") tenancy, which is essentially hosting withsome self-service but no sharing of computing resources and no elasticity. Still, this can beattractive, especially when users are concerned about security and privacy in a shared environment




and are willing to forgo the optimizations offered by sharing resources in favor of peace of mindregarding the perceived integrity and privacy of their data. Users expecting the typical benefits ofthe cloud-native shared-everything multitenancy — high productivity, continuous versioning,minimal overprovisioning, fine-grained elasticity — are often disappointed when presented with thecloud-based shared-hardware multitenancy. As the leading application infrastructure vendorsdeliver their platform as a service (PaaS) offerings — almost all are shared-hardware or shared-OS— the disappointment is likely to grow, pushing the notion of elastic multitenancy toward theTrough of Disillusionment. However, during the next three to five years, more mainstream PaaSofferings will support the cloud-native forms of multitenancy and will help to advance the idea ofmultitenancy toward the Plateau of Productivity.

User Advice:

■ Shared-hardware and shared-OS multitenancy can be compatible with traditional precloudapplication infrastructures and applications. Choose these PaaS offerings to migrate existingworkloads and skills to cloud platforms, but be aware that the benefits of such moves will fallshort of some of the expectations that users may have of PaaS (and cloud), including highproductivity, continuous versioning and fine-grained elasticity.

■ Invest in at least some initiatives using shared-container or shared-everything PaaS to gainexperience with the full-function multitenant cloud environment and its software designpractices.

■ Although the disruptive forms of multitenancy generally offer a more complete cloudexperience, the right choice of architecture for a particular project depends on thecircumstances of the project: regulatory constraints, available skills, required backwardcompatibility, required levels of productivity, manageability, and so forth. In other words, morecloudiness is not always better.

■ When looking for a PaaS offering, give preference to providers that offer or plan to offer multipletypes of multitenancy to cover the different needs of varied current and future projects.

■ When looking for a SaaS offering, give preference to providers using the cloud-native shared-everything forms of multitenancy, expecting higher degrees of productivity for extensions,unintrusive application versioning and extension, and efficiency (which may or may not bepassed to the subscriber in cost savings).

■ Do not wait for the perfect technology before starting to use cloud platforms. The risk of beingtoo late may be higher than the risk of being too early.

Business Impact: Competent use of multitenancy reduces the costs of IT operations for providersof cloud services by packing workloads with higher density. It also decreases the levels ofovercapacity in advanced private cloud data centers that establish private multitenant PaaS.Multitenant application environments are more agile in their use of computing power. Overall, well-applied multitenancy reduces the cost of computing and increases the agility with whichapplications respond to changing levels of demand, even though the public cloud servicesproviders may not pass the savings to the users without some competitive pressure to do so.







Sample Vendors: Appistry; CloudBees; Cordys; Engine Yard; GigaSpaces Technologies; maatG;Pivotal; Progress Software; Red Hat; salesforce.com; Software AG


"Gartner Reference Architecture for Elasticity and Multitenancy"


"Understanding Tenancy: Salesforce.com Versus Google.com"

"What IT Leaders Need To Know About Application PaaS Models and Use Patterns"


Analysis By: Donald Feinberg

Definition: A database platform as a service (dbPaaS) is a database management system (DBMS)or data store engineered as a scalable, elastic, multitenant service and sold and supported by acloud services provider. They are available as one-to-many cloud services, are not necessarilyrelational and offer a degree of self-service. EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Cloud Database andMicrosoft's Windows Azure SQL Database are examples of complete DBMSs, while products likeAmazon's SimpleDB are nonrelational data stores with different persistence models.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: All the currently available dbPaaS offerings arerelatively new. EnterpriseDB entered this market in 2012 with its Postgres Plus Cloud Database. Theother fully relational dbPaaS offerings with atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID)properties are salesforce.com's Database.com and Oracle's Application Express (Apex).

There are several non-ACID dbPaaS offerings that allow for eventual consistency, which restrictsthem to less complex, and normally single-user, transactions — especially where data is used byonly one transaction at a time and locking is not required. Non-ACID dbPaaS technology isbecoming more widely used for Web 2.0 development projects, where sharing of data amongmultiple tenants in the cloud is not a requirement of the application. Garantia Data is an example ofa NoSQL dbPaaS and further, is an in-memory DBMS.

Although dbPaaS remains with few examples in the market, this is growing. We believe that in thetwo- to five-year horizon, we will see a number of new entrants. This is due not only to the growingdemand, but also the growing maturity and availability of the cloud platform.

Most of the DBMS engines are available on a cloud infrastructure, for example, Amazon's ElasticCompute Cloud, but these are not dbPaaS according to our definition (see "What IT Leaders Needto Know about Application PaaS Models and Use Patterns").




Standard DBMSs are not specifically engineered to take advantage of the cloud, which includesAmazon's Relational Database Service (available for MySQL and Oracle implementations), IBM'sDB2, Microsoft SQL Server in a Windows Azure Virtual Machine, Oracle's offerings and manyothers. These are offered as hosted services, not as cloud services, since the data store software inquestion makes no provision for elasticity or other cloud capabilities, and users are expected tomanage the DBMS instances and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In addition, users normallypurchase the licenses separately from the IaaS.

Many Web 2.0 applications may be experimenting with some of these services, but most still rely onnon-cloud-based DBMS implementations. One exception is where all the data already exists in thecloud and it is desirable to have the application there, with the data, for example, with SaaSapplication data. One advantage of dbPaaS is that it doesn't use license-based pricing, but rather"elastic" pricing (the more you use, the more you pay; the less you use, the less you pay) or fixedsubscription pricing (a flat price per user). This flexibility is an advantage as long as the "rental"price does not exceed the standard licensing cost.

The rate of adoption of dbPaaS will depend on its increasing maturity, the acceptance of cloudsystem infrastructure in general and the maturation of dbPaaS offerings. It will also depend on theusage model and whether the relaxed consistency model can be used by an application. Gartnerbelieves additional dbPaaS products will become available as true cloud services during the nextfew years, in line with what Microsoft has done with Windows Azure SQL Database.

Additionally, the increased maturity and growth will be able to replace some of the less-critical,smaller workloads currently on-premises. The time to the Plateau of Productivity for dbPaaS haschanged over the past few years as it is not widely used for production databases. This has causedus to keep it in the two- to five-year range. As more products become available and their useincreases, we expect to see the maturity level and market acceptance grow, although this will becloser to the five-year horizon.

Currently, dbPaaS is used primarily for the development and testing of applications — wheredatabase sizes are small and issues of security and sharing with multiple users are not a concern.Recently, we have seen examples of applications using dbPaaS in production applicationsdeployed in the cloud on Windows Azure SQL Database, Database.com and others. This growinguse for development and production, coupled with the growing number of offerings, many in 2012,moves the technology closer to the Trough of Disillusionment.

User Advice: Advice for users in the next two years:

■ Restrict direct use of dbPaaS to development and test systems, smaller production systemswith a low number of users, or those requiring file storage in the cloud with one writer andmultiple readers. This is especially important when the time to delivery is short and resourcesand funding are scarce.

■ Realize that use of the few proven products, such as Microsoft Windows Azure SQL Databaseand salesforce.com's Database.com, in a production environment for smaller applications isrealistic if the costs in that environment meet your requirements.




■ Consider use of dbPaaS for hosting Web-specific content.

■ Be cautious about dbPaaS, as there may still be issues with security and reliability — and withsome non-relational DBMSs there are issues with concurrent user control.

■ Exercise care with systems with high levels of data transference — most cloud infrastructurevendors charge for movements of data in and out of the cloud.

■ Recognize that latency is another data transfer issue — the time available to transfer largeamounts of data to the cloud (for example, to support a data warehouse in the cloud) can berestricted. Hence, initial usage for development systems (with minimal data transfer) can bebeneficial, before moving the systems in-house after development.

Business Impact: Initially, dbPaaS will have an impact on software vendors (especially smallerones) requiring a less-expensive platform for development. Increasingly, Gartner's clients reportsimilar use for application development within IT organizations. As dbPaaS gains maturity(especially in scalability, reliability and security), implementations used for short-term projects (suchas small departmental applications and rapid development platforms) will show some marked costreductions, compared with implementations within IT departments.

These cost savings will be primarily based on the ability to set up a dbPaaS environment withoutthe use of expensive IT personnel. The speed of setup will be a primary driver of the rapiddeployment of systems — without the usual requirements and planning necessary for IT projectswithin the IT department. This will also reduce the need for IT staff to respond to short-notice andshort-duration projects, so reducing overall IT costs.

Some vendors, such as Microsoft, now offer both dbPaaS and cloud hosting (SQL Server onWindows Azure), allowing customers to decide where to locate applications and also to have theflexibility to move them as desired. Although this does require careful attention to functionality (notall functionality is available in both), it does allow customers to use dbPaaS and decide later, as therequirements grow, to move to hosted cloud, if desired (or vice versa).

Elasticity is a requirement for a DBMS to be classified as a dbPaaS and to deliver the benefitsexpected of a cloud platform service. Elastic resource allocation for the virtual machines and thestorage must be provided by the DBMS for both simple and complex transactions. This can have animpact on overall cost as usage requirements change over time, especially if usage is seasonal (as,for example, in the retail sector). Elasticity allows the database to grow and contract as needed andso has the same effect on cost, growth and contracting.

As dbPaaS offerings mature during the next two to five years, it will be possible for an organizationto host its entire DBMS infrastructure as dbPaaS, with potential reductions in the cost of servers,storage, DBMS licenses, maintenance and support, storage management and databaseadministration. This will be of interest, particularly for financial managers monitoring costs anddesiring to reduce the overall cost of IT.






Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Amazon; Cloudant; EnterpriseDB; Garantia Data; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Oracle;salesforce.com




Analysis By: Lydia Leong

Definition: IaaS is a standardized, highly automated offering where compute resources,complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offeredto the customer on demand. The resources are scalable and elastic, operate in near real time andare metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer, such as a Web-based UI and an API. The resources may be single- or multitenant, and are hosted either by theservice provider off-site, or on-premises in the customer's data center.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: In practical terms, IaaS is on-demand computingcapacity rented from a service provider. Rather than buying servers and running them within theirown data centers, businesses simply obtain the necessary infrastructure from a service provider in ashared, scalable, "elastic" way, and access it via the Internet or a private network. In someorganizations, IaaS may eventually replace the traditional data center.

The four main use cases for cloud-based compute infrastructure services are:

■ Web hosting

■ High-performance computing

■ Test and development infrastructure

■ General production infrastructure

The most rapidly maturing use case is the hosting of websites and Web-based applications. Insome cases, the applications deployed on IaaS serve a general consumer audience via the publicInternet. In a growing number of cases, however, IaaS is used to serve internal applications to userswithin the enterprise, including hosting applications like Microsoft SharePoint. IaaS may also beused as the back end to a mobile application, such as an iPhone app. These uses of IaaS areconvergent with the general Web hosting market and features, and capabilities formerly availableonly on dedicated hardware are now being extended to shared cloud resources.

The use of these services for test and development infrastructure is growing for pilot projects, rapidapplication development environments and formal lab environments. As test and development-specific features and management tools improve, formal development environments will becomemore common. Batch-oriented, compute-intensive workloads (such as modeling, simulation,




scientific computing and one-time processing needs like transcoding) are highly cost-effective inthe cloud.

Cloud IaaS is increasingly used for general-purpose workloads, including mission-critical enterpriseapplications. However, before it can achieve broader mainstream adoption, security, risk andcompliance issues must be overcome and costs driven down even further.

These services are maturing and being adopted most quickly in the U.S. Although global demand isrobust, including in emerging markets, the growth of the market is slower outside the U.S. due toless competition, less mature offerings, and fragmentation resulting from regulatory and data-sovereignty requirements and the need to keep data and processing in-country.

User Advice: Cloud provider capabilities vary significantly, but enterprise-class clouds, with strongSLAs backed by financial penalties, high levels of security and solid service and support, haveemerged. Businesses can safely adopt these services. The risks are not significantly greater thanother outsourced hosting approaches, assuming the cloud services used match the service-leveland security needs of the applications.

Most enterprises, and many midmarket businesses, have already successfully executed pilotprojects and have begun to adopt IaaS in a broader way, including for production applications.Businesses that have not yet trialed IaaS should consider pilot projects for test and development,compute capacity augmentation, and Web content and applications. Successful pilots can beexpanded into broader production use.

Both public multitenant and private single-tenant offerings are available, but the distinction betweenpublic and private cloud IaaS is blurring. The most cost-effective clouds are highly standardized anduse a shared capacity pool. Hybrid public/private cloud offerings — enabling "cloud bursting" foron-demand capacity and business continuity — currently exist but the technology will not bemature until at least 2016.

This market is evolving extremely quickly, so the suitability of these services should be re-evaluatedat least once every six months.

Business Impact: Cloud compute infrastructure services will be broadly advantageous to ITorganizations. The cost benefits, driven primarily by automation, will be particularly significant forsmall and midsize businesses. Larger enterprises will benefit primarily from greater flexibility, ratherthan direct cost reduction.

In the short term, the benefits will be driven primarily by rapid provisioning that requires minimalmanual intervention. Over the longer term, more system management tasks will be automated,leading to more efficient infrastructure management. Organizations that simply "lift and shift"workloads to the cloud will reap limited cost and efficiency benefits compared to those who useIaaS as a way to drive IT transformation.

The metered-by-use attribute of these services will result in more efficient use of capacity and theirself-service nature will empower employees outside of IT operations, improving developerproductivity and making it easier for business buyers to obtain infrastructure.






Maturity: Emerging

Sample Vendors: Amazon Web Services; CSC; Joyent; Rackspace; Savvis; Verizon Terremark

Climbing the Slope


Analysis By: Robert P. Desisto

Definition: Software as a service (SaaS) is application software owned, delivered and managedremotely by one or more providers. The provider delivers an application based on a single set ofcommon code and data definitions that is consumed in a one-to-many model by all contractedcustomers at any time. SaaS is purchased on a pay-for-use basis or as a subscription based onusage metrics.

Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The purpose of the SaaS positioning on the HypeCycle is to provide an aggregate view of the state of SaaS in the context of cloud computing. TheSaaS positioning reflects the maturity of SaaS in the context of leveraging the cloud computinginfrastructure. Because different software applications using SaaS would be placed on differentpoints on a Hype Cycle, due to continued acceleration of SaaS applications in the market, the SaaSprofile has continued its movement on the Hype Cycle to the Trough of Disillusionment/Plateau ofProductivity midpoint.

User Advice: Companies with complex requirements should not assume they will significantly lowertheir total cost of ownership or reduce complexity by moving to SaaS. Companies with tight capitalbudgets, those that are IT-resource-constrained and those that want to get something simpledeployed quickly should consider SaaS. Even if one or more criteria involved in considering SaaSare not met (see "Four Components Define Software as a Service"), a SaaS solution still may bebest for a company. However, as with any product, a company should evaluate the functionalcapabilities of the SaaS offering to meet the company's specific requirements.

Business Impact: SaaS has the effect of lowering expenses for the first two years, because it doesnot require an upfront capital investment. However, in subsequent years, SaaS may become moreexpensive, because the operating expense does not decrease. SaaS is also helpful to companiesthat do not have the IT resources to deploy and maintain on-premises software. This is prevalent insmall and midsize businesses, as well as large businesses that have experienced downsizing in theIT department. SaaS will enable companies to get to live deployment status more quickly, especiallywhen deploying applications with less complexity. On an ongoing basis, SaaS provides more agilityfor making configuration changes for users.





Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience

Maturity: Early mainstream

Sample Vendors: Concur; Microsoft; NetSuite; Oracle; RightNow; salesforce.com; SAP; Workday


"Toolkit: Business Case Model for Total Cost of Ownership Analysis of SaaS Versus TraditionalApplication Software and Services"

Appendixes




Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS), 2012

Technology Trigger

Peak ofInflated

Expectations

Trough of Disillusionment Slope of Enlightenment

Plateau of Productivity

time

expectations

Plateau will be reached in:

less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 yearsobsoletebefore plateau

As of July 2012

Customization Brokerage

Business Analytics PaaS

Comprehensive PaaS

ALM PaaS

Cloud MOM Services

Cloud Managed File Transfer ServicesPortal PaaS

Application Service Governance

Cloud-Enabled Application Platforms(CEAPs)

Open PaaS

Application PaaSElastic Multitenancy

Cloud Computing

Application Security as a Service

Integration Brokerage


Web and Application Hosting

Service-Oriented Architecture



BPM Platform as a Service (bpmPaaS)

Cloud-Enabled IntegrationPlatforms (CEIPs)

Private Platform as a Service

IaaS + Middleware

Platform as a Service

Integration PaaS





Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels




Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases

Phase Definition

Innovation Trigger A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant press and industry interest.

Peak of Inflated Ex-pectations

During this phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of well-publicized activity by technology leaders results in somesuccesses, but more failures, as the technology is pushed to its limits. The only enterprises making money are conference organizers andmagazine publishers.

Trough of Disillusion-ment

Because the technology does not live up to its overinflated expectations, it rapidly becomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, exceptfor a few cautionary tales.

Slope of Enlighten-ment

Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of organizations lead to a true understanding of the tech-nology's applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease the development process.

Plateau of Productivity The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Tools and methodologies are increasingly stable as they entertheir second and third generations. Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reduced level of risk; the rapid growthphase of adoption begins. Approximately 20% of the technology's target audience has adopted or is adopting the technology as it entersthis phase.

Years to MainstreamAdoption

The time required for the technology to reach the Plateau of Productivity.





Table 2. Benefit Ratings

Benefit Rating Definition

Transformational Enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics

High Enables new ways of performing horizontal or vertical processes that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enter-prise

Moderate Provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise

Low Slightly improves processes (for example, improved user experience) that will be difficult to translate into increased revenue or cost savings





Table 3. Maturity Levels

Maturity Level Status Products/Vendors

Embryonic ■ In labs ■ None

Emerging ■ Commercialization by vendorsPilots and deployments by industry leaders

■ First generationHigh priceMuch customization

Adolescent ■ Maturing technology capabilities and process understandingUptake beyond early adopters

■ Second generationLess customization

Early mainstream ■ Proven technologyVendors, technology and adoption rapidly evolving

■ Third generationMore out of boxMethodologies

Mature mainstream ■ Robust technologyNot much evolution in vendors or technology

■ Several dominant vendors

Legacy ■ Not appropriate for new developmentsCost of migration constrains replacement

■ Maintenance revenue focus

Obsolete ■ Rarely used ■ Used/resale market only





Additional analysis by Massimo Pezzini

Recommended ReadingSome documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles"


"PaaS 2013: Now Is the Time for IT Leaders to Understand PaaS"


"Hype Cycle for Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS), 2012"









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