PaaS market integration has already begun

There is no question that the PaaS market has become more crowded. In addition to independent PaaS vendors, there are many IaaS vendors like Amazon that have joined, and even some traditional enterprise technology vendors. Otherwise, they may all fail to survive.

"Any one market starts with thousands of vendors joining and then gradually consolidating, leaving only two or four more vendors at the end," said Forrester analyst John Rymer. "I do not think the PaaS market is an exception anymore."

And integration has started. PaaS provider Engine Yard gained PHP functionality by acquiring Orchestra. Salesforce acquired Heroku for a broader user base than its own Force.com. Oracle invested in Engine Yard.

In addition to Oracle, some other traditional large enterprises have also entered the market, but the pace somewhat slower. IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and SAP have released their own commercial PaaS beta or plan releases.

In a survey conducted in the third quarter of last year, Forrester asked a number of developers of organizations already using PaaS, IaaS, or other cloud services. Although there were no major brands in the survey, Rymer said that Forrester asked the same question in a new survey and the initial results obtained showed that the surveyed companies now have cloud solutions from IBM and Oracle .

Large manufacturers face the new model

The reason why some of the big players entered this market is relatively slow because they have not invested heavily in this area and companies are just beginning to adopt PaaS, Rymer said.

And he notes that PaaS's business model is "completely new" to many traditional vendors. The pay-as-you-go model for cloud computing is very different from the way sales contracts are used by these businesses.

Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees, also believes that the traditional business model has dragged the hind legs of traditional vendors. "This is not to say they're stupid, but because cloud models are not compatible with their existing business models."

To date, "Microsoft is at the forefront of the four vendors - Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP - because of the adoption of the cloud and the actual use of Azure," Rymer said.

Microsoft's way

Microsoft is developing a strategy to integrate its public cloud, Azure, with Microsoft's already-in -house Microsoft infrastructure, hoping to capitalize on this unique approach to solidifying its position as a leader in traditional vendors.

"What has changed in the past two years is that we are no longer isolated application sets that run inside the enterprise and that we have isolated application sets that run on Azure but that are continuous with each other," Doug Hauger, general manager of Microsoft Azure said . "I did not say that we are the only vendors doing this, but we are indeed the only vendor today that offers our customers a wide range of choices. Customers can choose between public and private clouds, whether in-house or enterprise, with exactly the same or Similar technology to work. "

Microsoft also prudently tested the workbench that puts PaaS and IaaS solutions in the same place. It also recently released a commercial version of the IaaS solution.

Choose Infrastructure Services

AWS started out as an IaaS vendor and then added PaaS services through Elastic Beanstalk. Other IaaS providers are also typically acquiring PaaS solutions instead of self-building (this trend is also driving consolidation).

But at least some users want PaaS and IaaS services to remain independent. At present, some PaaS products can only be used on AWS, but other manufacturers can give users more choice, but also allow users to choose an infrastructure service.

Mario Cruz, co-founder and CTO at Choose Digital, explains why he prefers to choose infrastructure services: "It was done to make the PaaS vendors more honest." Cruz said he pays PaaS now for a year at a bargain price Before a lot of low, but the usage is rapidly growing. This is mainly because AWS has dropped the price several times in a row. The choice of vendor means that he can choose the best one.

There are other benefits to choosing an IaaS vendor. "This is related to implementation details," Labourey said. For example, you can say, "I chose Terremark because of its data center closer to my user base."

But for some other reasons, some users still want a separate PaaS product. Michael Smith, CTO of Canvas, a digital design firm, said that after talking to vendors offering various hosting services, he found that none of these vendors had a particularly powerful PaaS product. "Because it's not their core business, I received an email from AWS a week later saying they are building their own PaaS product."

PaaS continue to be viable

Not all IaaS providers are interested in providing their own PaaS service. Chris Drumgoogle, who runs Terremark's global operations, said, "Some of our best customers are PaaS providers." Terremark may decide to work closely with vendors who have a more collaborative relationship with these providers.

"But I do not think we'll get into this market soon," Drumgoogle said. "It's best for PaaS vendors to continue doing PaaS, and what our people really are up to is infrastructure as long as they use our infrastructure."

However, Labourey believes that, in the end, IaaS vendors will find there is a good reason for them to force them to provide PaaS. "Just looking at the relationships at work shows that the true owner of a customer is actually a PaaS vendor." If the customer has a close relationship with the PaaS vendor, the IaaS vendor may be dumped because of a better deal. Labourey said IaaS vendors will eventually be aware of this, and then they will decide to use PaaS to strengthen the relationship with customers.