The Hype around Cloud Computing, APaaS and SEAP
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 15:07 by dCheng
Gartner is tracking the hype around Cloud Computing in their latest report “Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2009″ and cloud computing’s path towards mainstream acceptance. In particular, it looked at APaaS (Application Platform as a Service) and suggests that it is a transformational technology that is only 2 to 5 years from being adopted by mainstream IT while its initial penetration is less than 1%.
According to Gartner, “application platform as a service (APaaS) is a development and deployment environment for cloud-based applications, offered to IT organizations as a service.” Businesses will likely need to rethink their perspective on applications, as Gartner also states that:
APaaS is a part of a fundamental and discontinuous change in the application platform market. It is part of a larger SaaS and cloud-computing phenomenon, all amounting to one core change — the transition from IT solutions that are conceived, deployed and managed under the control of an enterprise IT department to IT solutions that are applied and composed by the enterprise, but executed and managed by expert third-party providers. It is a step toward greater industrialization of IT, to predictable, dependable, professionally managed, plentiful and agile information resources.
Gartner estimates that most IT organizations are or will in the next five years become partly dependent on SaaS-style software. Some may begin developing their own custom applications on APaaS leading to a change in IT jobs, organizations and budget allocations.
In a separate hype cycle report “Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure, 2009,” Gartner also looked into application infrastructures. There it examined SaaS/Cloud-Enabled Application Platforms, also a transformational technology due to make its mainstream impact in 2 to 5 years. Gartner describes SEAP as a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-enabled application programmable platform for the development and deployment of custom applications that is specially designed to support SaaS-style applications. SEAP is inherently multi-tenant and is designed to provide a complete platform for ISVs to develop their own suite of SaaS applications.
