Cloud growth focused on IaaS, and IaaS and PaaS combined

October 16, 2018

A blog post by David Linthicum, managing director, chief cloud strategy officer, Deloitte Consulting LLP

According to Gartner, the Worldwide Public Cloud Services Market is projected to grow by 17.33 percent in 2019 to total $206.2 billion, up from $175.8 billion in 2018. This year the market will grow a healthy 21 percent up from $145.3 billion in 2017 according to the report.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will be the fastest-growing segment of the market, forecasted to grow by 27.6 percent in 2019 to reach $39.5 billion, up from $31 billion in 2018. Indeed, by 2022, Gartner expects that 90 percent of enterprises purchasing public cloud IaaS will do so from an integrated IaaS and Platform as a Service (PaaS) and will use both the IaaS and PaaS capabilities from that provider.¹

What’s interesting here is that the PaaS systems that IaaS providers provide, such as AWS’s Elastic Bean Stalk and Google Google App Engine, are generally the preferred PaaS platforms. Perhaps not because they are the best fit for enterprises, but they are already integrated into the IaaS platform of choice, such as AWS or Google Cloud Platform IaaS platform.

So, we can determine by this report that IaaS has exploded and will continue to explode in growth, growing 27.6 percent next year. However, for some public cloud providers it will be difficult to figure out how to break apart PaaS and IaaS since the PaaS service is imbedded in the IaaS cloud.

This is not great news for independent PaaS providers not a part of the larger IaaS provider that may be overlooked not due to their inabilities, but due do the fact that they are not integrated in an IaaS cloud. We’ll learn more as we get data from those sectors, and as we begin to breakout PaaS and IaaS sales within the same public cloud provider.

Besides the fact that PaaS users tend to leverage what we can call “PaaS of convenience,” what does this mean for enterprises? A few things come to mind:

• Enterprises perhaps should perhaps consider other third-party PaaS providers that are not integrated with an IaaS player. It seems that if we’re picking best-of-breed, then we should be open to all options.
• There should be a consideration of the value of integration with the PaaS and IaaS provider as a data point in making decisions. Perhaps the PaaS provider is not as good of a match, but the integration provides value above and beyond any missing features.

That said, I suspect that the use of “PaaS of convenience” will be preferred for most enterprises. This will serve to shift the market, and perhaps even one day combining PaaS and IaaS into one concept, and one technology. We’re moving there quickly, I’m thinking.

¹ https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-09-12-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-revenue-to-grow-17-percent-in-2019