Wave Report

The Forrester Wave™: Platform-As-A-Service For Vendor Strategy Professionals, Q2 2011

Identifying The Best Partner Choices For ISVs And Service Providers

John Rymer
Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
 and  two contributors
May 19, 2011

Summary

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings represent a critical space within the broader cloud ecosystem, as they provide the linkage between application platforms and underlying cloud infrastructures. In order to build a viable cloud market strategy, vendor strategists of independent software vendors (ISVs) and tech service providers need to understand their partnership opportunities in this area. In this report, we outline how Forrester's 149-criteria evaluation of 10 PaaS vendors can be used to determine the best partner choices. Our research unveils that salesforce.com, because of its comprehensive PaaS features and strong vision and strategy, represents the top choice for ISVs. For service providers, we see strong performances of Cordys, LongJump, Microsoft, salesforce.com, and WorkXpress, which support multiple deployment and business models. Although PaaS overall is still in the early stages of its evolution with lots of potential risks for buyers, without a strong set of PaaS choices, vendor strategy professionals will struggle to make a safe infrastructure bet for their SaaS application platforms or local ecosystems.

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