Multiple PaaS Flavors Hit The Enterprise

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is a confusing category, as the term "PaaS" is applied to cloud services with very different capabilities — and new options are appearing every month. Many providers in the more mature infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) space are trying to offer value-added services on top of their basic cloud infrastructures to get a share of the PaaS market. And PaaS offerings provided by successful software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors are further fragmenting and diversifying PaaS platforms. The result is a crowded market, with many different PaaS offerings providing completely different capabilities. This report provides an overview of the different capabilities provided under the PaaS label and enables CIOs to identify which PaaS offerings fall into the same camp — or which ones can complement each another in a well-governed enterprise landscape.