This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High- Productivity Application Platform as a Service Published: 26 April 2018 ID: G00331975 Analyst(s): Paul Vincent, Van Baker, Yefim Natis, Kimihiko Iijima, Mark Driver, Rob Dunie, Jason Wong, Aashish Gupta High-productivity application platform as a service continues to increase its footprint across enterprise IT as businesses juggle the demand for applications, digital business requirements and skill set challenges. We examine these market forces and the leading enterprise vendors for such platforms. Market Definition/Description Platform as a service (PaaS) is application infrastructure functionality enriched with cloud characteristics and offered as a service. Application platform as a service (aPaaS) is a PaaS offering that supports application development, deployment and execution in the cloud. It encapsulates resources such as infrastructure. High- productivity aPaaS (hpaPaaS) provides rapid application development (RAD) features for development, deployment and execution — in the cloud. High-productivity application platform as a service (hpaPaaS) solutions provide services for declarative, model-driven application design and development, and simplified one-button deployments. They typically create metadata and interpret that metadata at runtime; many allow optional procedural programming extensions. The underlying infrastructure of these solutions is opaque to the user as they do not deal with servers or containers directly. The rapid application development (RAD) features are often referred to as "low-code" and "no-code" support. These hpaPaaS solutions contrast with those for "high-control" aPaaS, which need professional programming — "pro-code" support, through third-generation languages (3GLs) — and provide transparent access to the underlying infrastructure. Enterprise PaaS ensures support for enterprise application requirements — such as high availability/ disaster recovery, external service access, strong security features, and the availability of technical support. For enterprise hpaPaaS, these capabilities may also extend to support mixed high- productivity and high-control application development, hybrid deployments on-premises as well as cloud, and sharing of enterprise services such as for security. This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. Such hpaPaaS solutions provide support for: ■ UI capabilities via responsive web and mobile apps ■ Orchestration or choreography of pages, business process, and decisions or business rules ■ Built-in database ■ "One-button" deployment They are, by definition, multifunction, and their functionality often extends into newer domains such as event handling and processing, Internet of Things (IoT) support, analytics, and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services. The hpaPaaS developer experience focuses on no-code and low-code capabilities: ■ No-code users include citizen developers and will utilize graphical modeling experiences. ■ Low-code users have more development skills and augment graphical development tooling with scripting or more sophisticated model types such as entity relationship diagrams, business process model and notation, and decision model and notation. Only vendors providing "enterprise" hpaPaaS — as a public cloud service — are considered in this Magic Quadrant. Some of these platforms are aligned closely with particular SaaS solutions, but this Magic Quadrant focuses on general application development tasks where extending SaaS is just one of six common use-case types considered. See "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2016" for an expanded form of the definition of aPaaS and other forms of cloud application infrastructure services (xPaaS). In particular, note that the related areas of business process management (BPM) and mobile app development have some characteristics of high-productivity development (see "Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites" and "Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms"). Some vendors in these markets are, increasingly, tending to go to market with their solutions as hpaPaaS products used for hpaPaaS use cases — and are therefore included in this Magic Quadrant. See "Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service, 2017" for the trend to maturity of this market segment. Also, "The Key Trends in PaaS, 2018" for a discussion on "high productivity" as a segment of the "cloud spectrum" of services that needs to be considered by IT leaders. Page 2 of 56 Gartner, Inc. | G00331975 This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. Magic Quadrant Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service Source: Gartner (April 2018) Gartner, Inc. | G00331975 Page 3 of 56 This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. Vendor Strengths and Cautions AgilePoint AgilePoint has offered its NX low-code hpaPaaS since 2015. NX has evolved quickly from a BPM- oriented platform to support more general application development tasks. Most of its customer base lies in North America, but it has a sizable market base in both EMEA and Asia/Pacific — with extensive partner networks in each of these geographies. NX supports hybrid environments, and can be used as public or dedicated PaaS as well as on-premises and private cloud. All environments have the same code base; a user can start on-premises and then migrate the application to the cloud. AgilePoint is based in Mountain View, California, U.S., and NX is priced per named or concurrent user, or per resource used (CPU core), with a reduced price for environments dedicated to Microsoft integrations. Strengths ■ AgilePoint supports, and provides some portability across, multiple clouds — customers can choose between Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS), or running natively on Salesforce platforms and others — with an on-premises option as well. The strong focus on multiple SaaS support demonstrates a good understanding of the position of independent PaaS providers. ■ AgilePoint allows enterprises licensing based on the capacity of concurrent logged-in users, which is unique in this space. Under this model, organizations can "share" licenses between users, as opposed to buying individual licenses for infrequent users. Further pricing innovations, such as transaction-based, are planned. Reference customers scored AgilePoint higher than average for negotiations and flexibility of contracts. ■ AgilePoint has recently expanded its investment in AI-driven application scenarios. It has integrated ML-based application routing and continues to expand AI-driven application development and the continuous improvement of applications. ■ AgilePoint has strong support for business process modeling and integration, making the platform particularly attractive to "process-centric" application design/architectures. Reference customers quoted "improve business process automation" as a primary driver for their adoption of NX, which gained the second-highest score in the Magic Quadrant for this; it also scored above average for approval of its integration features. Cautions ■ While extending its PaaS customer base steadily, AgilePoint's total number of paid customers remains relatively small compared with many of its competitors — although some customers are heavy adopters. AgilePoint plans to address this shortfall with more marketing. Its small size reduces AgilePoint's investment options and could potentially make it an acquisition target. Page 4 of 56 Gartner, Inc. | G00331975 This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. This research note is restricted to the personal use of [email protected]. ■ AgilePoint's competitors remain mostly in the BPM rather than the aPaaS segment; it is, potentially, missing out on deals due to market perception. ■ AgilePoint's capabilities in extending SaaS such as Microsoft could be threatened by these vendors' entry into, and renewed interest in, hpaPaaS. One-quarter of AgilePoint's current customers are Microsoft-focused, for example, and not all of them will be interested in NX's multiplatform support. ■ A sizable number of reference customers for AgilePoint quoted "end-user experience" as an area of potential improvement, and a below-average number of references used it for B2C applications. Customers also scored AgilePoint as being below average for availability and for usage of accelerators such as templates and prebuilt processes. Appian Appian offers a low-code hpaPaaS solution, which enables application authors to create both process- and data-centric applications through its strong BPM and case management capabilities. Appian has been delivering its Appian Cloud platform since 2007. It has taken a unified-platform approach that used a single application definition, without change, on a range of devices. Appian applications can be developed and executed both on-premises and on its aPaaS offering. Appian has positioned its Appian Cloud platform for general-purpose application development, which includes robust process orchestration,