PaaS Cloud: The Business Perspective

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the current state, challenges, and future prospects of PaaS cloud technology from a business perspective, including industry SWOT, stakeholder issues, and market trends.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive SWOT analysis, stakeholder issue identification, and market insights for PaaS, along with research directions and practitioner recommendations.

Findings

PaaS is gaining popularity but lags behind SaaS and IaaS.

SWOT analysis highlights strengths and weaknesses of PaaS.

Survey reveals market leaders and emerging trends.

Abstract

The next generation of PaaS technology accomplishes the true promise of object-oriented and 4GLs development with less effort. Now PaaS is becoming one of the core technical services for application development organizations. PaaS offers a resourceful and agile approach to develop, operate and deploy applications in a cost-effective manner. It is now turning out to be one of the preferred choices throughout the world, especially for globally distributed development environment. However it still lacks the scale of popularity and acceptance which Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) have attained. PaaS offers a promising future with novel technology architecture and evolutionary development approach. In this article, we identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the PaaS industry. We then identify the various issues that will affect the different stakeholders of PaaS industry. This research will outline a set of recommendations for the PaaS practitioners to better manage this technology. For PaaS technology researchers, we also outline the number of research areas that need attention in coming future. Finally, we also included an online survey to outline PaaS technology market leaders. This will facilitate PaaS technology practitioners to have a more deep insight into market trends and technologies.