Enterprise developers looking to tap into platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings over the next 18 months will not want for choice. In fact, one could argue that the existence of so many choices is creating confusion and inhibiting the growth of PaaS. Gartner has estimated that the worldwide PaaS market will reach $927.3 million this year. The biggest segment of the market (pulling down 38%) is what Gartner calls aPaaS - or application PaaS - which is denned as a service that offers functionality similar to that of an application server in the traditional on-premises software architecture sense. A distant second in Gartner's forecast is iPaaS - a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integration flows between any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data. From there, the PaaS categories get broken down into application life-cycle PaaS, business process management PaaS, database PaaS and messaging PaaS, to name only a few of the "other" market segments.
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