Demand for PaaS on the rise

A new age of Develop Your Own Application (DYOA) to meet ever-changing business requirements is driving demand for rapid application development Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technologies.

According to a survey of 700 IT decision makers in the US, UK, France, Germany, Benelux, Australia, Brazil and Singapore, there is soaring demand for PaaS architecture from organizations looking for faster development and deployment cycles.

A rapid application development PaaS solution allows custom business applications to be quickly developed and deployed using point and click-type tools in a web browser.

As many as 85% of survey respondents said that there is demand within their organization to reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy applications, highlighting that the DYOA trend is primarily being driven at a business rather than IT level.

Conducted by Vanson Bourne, the research surveyed IT decision makers in a number of key global locations. It also found:

• Almost three quarters (70%) of the respondents said that they are either already using PaaS solutions for application development or are planning to use them the future.
• Demand for rapid application development is coming from the highest levels of the company with 43% reporting the projects were being directed by C-suite influencers, while nearly half (47%) came from existing customers or partners.
• 47% of DYOA is being done by sales and marketing teams, the largest percentage among all respondents, while 44%% said finance teams were developing and deploying their own applications.
• Just over a quarter (27%) said that they had opted for platforms that favor speed over high control.
• 54% of existing PaaS users reported that it has already helped them to reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy applications, while 51% said PaaS had helped to reduce costs.
• 47% of those polled said that use of PaaS had given them more capacity for innovation within the organization, such as finding new ways to combine existing resources, or exploring more innovative ways of using mobile.

The study also showed that, largely because of these benefits, the use of PaaS for application development and deployment will continue to be a focus for organizations, with businesses planning to invest an average of $260,653 on this architecture before the end of the year.