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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.
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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.
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Magic Quadrant
Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service
Source: Gartner (April 2018)
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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.
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■ 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, decision management, application life cycle management and integration capabilities that compete with both hpaPaaS and BPM vendors. Appian provides per-user, per-application-and-user, or per-application pricing models, regardless of cloud or own-infrastructure usage. Appian is based in Reston, Virginia, U.S.
Strengths
■ Appian provides good data process and leading business logic functionality with support for the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard. This helps provide a good foundation for case management. Appian also provides good integration features for the development of composite applications as well as Continuous Delivery capabilities through external DevOps tooling support.
■ Appian has a strong focus on vertical markets, with its large professional services arm; and a strong international focus for delivery into markets worldwide, including Asia/Pacific. It augments these operations with 17 global system integrator (SI) partners.
■ Appian has deployed several innovative technologies, including: automated parallelizing of application execution; an AI-designer for predictive rules; automated native mobile UI deployment. The platform can now also deploy to Docker containers for development and test environments, providing benefits in hybrid application delivery and scalability.
■ References customers for Appian Cloud chose Appian for its functionality and product vision. They had above-average satisfaction with its functional depth and completeness, and for the end-user experience.
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Cautions
■ Appian retains much of its BPM-market roots, although it started transitioning to hpaPaaS earlier than its BPM competitors. This legacy is indicated by the below-average customer reference scores given to its citizen developer experience.
■ Appian continues to invest heavily in sales, marketing and product, but at a pace that will be difficult to maintain. This investment is part of a focus on the more profitable higher end of the market, yet Appian's overall number of hpaPaaS customers is still low compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
■ Appian's successful initial public offering (IPO) in 2017 could still provide distractions: The requirement to provide a return for investors, and the possibility of key staff members leaving remains a risk at this stage in the organization's development.
■ The Appian Cloud service is more expensive than the offerings of most other vendors included in this evaluation. While it does offer a number of pricing models, compared with the other vendors Appian's customer references indicated one of the lowest levels of satisfaction with its contract flexibility and pricing.
Betty Blocks Betty Blocks started as an hpaPaaS vendor in 2012, focusing on the citizen developer experience and innovative modular design oriented to the notion of assembly of applications from "blocks" (hence its name). It has developed a reputation for technology innovation, rebuilding its services in Elixir two years ago and, during the past year, re-engineering further onto a Kubernetes container platform. Betty Blocks has partnered with leading integration PaaS (iPaaS) provider Jitterbit for integration, and delivers its PaaS solutions on AWS and Microsoft Azure.
Based in the Netherlands, Betty Blocks has more than 400 customers, continuing its record of doubling its customer base every 12 to 18 months. It has expanded its presence in the U.S. and Japan, with the expectation that these territories will drive continued growth. Pricing is by subscription, tiered on application size as measured by models, actions, pages and web services deployed.
Strengths
■ Betty Blocks provides drag-and-drop application assembly, drawing on a library of prebuilt functional components (blocks) while allowing further UI JavaScript extensions. New components can be built using templates or by upgrading existing components that exploit the platform's component inheritance model.
■ Betty Blocks is following a best-of-breed partnership model; for example, with Jitterbit for integration, and with Chargify for SaaS billing services. In the busy and competitive hpaPaaS market, now targeted by most megavendors, forming partner ecosystems is a prerequisite for long-term success.
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■ Betty Blocks uses a microservices-type architecture based on the fault-tolerant Elixir language, and has added Kubernetes support for multicloud deployments, including private cloud (for example, on-premises). Functionality can be extended via options such as AWS Lambda. Confidence in the platform is such that more than two-thirds of deployed applications are customer-facing (B2C).
■ All Betty Blocks reference customers declared their use of the platform to be in high- productivity mode, unlike most other vendors. They also appreciated the vendor's innovation record and pricing model. Value-for-money was scored as higher than average, as were collaboration and back-end development.
Cautions
■ Betty Blocks remains one of the smaller hpaPaaS organizations and with its excellent record of growth and innovation could be a target for acquisition.
■ Offering the on-premises deployment of its platform via Docker images sets the company up for the potential need to maintain different versions of the product when customers fall behind on patches and upgrades. If it happens, this can significantly increase the cost of operations.
■ With its focus on reusable blocks and citizen development, features such as built-in test facilities remain poor or are still roadmap entries, while AI and ML services are outside the core platform and delivered as blocks. Meanwhile, the reusability aspects of blocks are mostly done by skilled developers, and options for mixed high-control development within the platform are minimal.
■ Reference customers for Betty Blocks scored it lower than average for the citizen developer experience, and fewer references than average liked the end-user experience.
bpm'online Bpm'online provides a BPM-oriented hpaPaaS, which has been available since 2011. This vendor delivers out-of-the-box solutions, integrations and processes that accelerate development, integration and implementation. It provides traditional workflow abilities that include the orchestration of processes across teams and applications to support continuous process transformations, as well as case management. It also focuses on citizen developers' efficiency and agility, and their capability to easily and rapidly modify existing applications and processes without deep technical skills.
Bpm'online is based in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. Its hpaPaaS solution is priced per named user and is built on top of .NET technology and deployed on the AWS cloud.
Strengths
■ The bpm'online service offers a citizen-developer-friendly experience with a comprehensive set of models for building process- and data-centric applications. It offers strong collaboration tools
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for developers to use during the design experience, and standards such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN).
■ Bpm'online offers more than 200 industry-specific and cross-industry applications and accelerators built on top of the service, with 400 development partners to provide customer services. It has large partner organizations worldwide, such as Amdocs, helping to deliver applications.
■ Applications built with bpm'online are portable and can be deployed either to its aPaaS solution or on-premises.
■ Compared with the other vendors evaluated, bpm'online had the highest proportion of customer references using citizen developers. Its references also indicated a high level of satisfaction with the price paid for the service, and higher-than-average scoring for the functional depth and completeness of the platform.
Cautions
■ Within the hpaPaaS market, bpm'online is not well-known. It is best-known for its CRM and BPM capabilities. Almost none of the other vendors' customer references included in this evaluation considered bpm'online as an alternative. They positioned it as more for bpmPaaS than for application development. The hpaPaaS market is a secondary focus of bpm'online's marketing message; it places more emphasis on CRM and BPM.
■ Bpm'online uses a named-user licensing model that is not appropriate for B2C applications. Also, the largest portion of its customer base is in the EMEA market; it is not as widely deployed in North America (the biggest market for hpaPaaS).
■ Compared with the other vendors included in this evaluation, bpm'online offers a lower degree of enterprise worthiness. Its standard recovery time objective (RTO) is four hours, although the vendor does offer custom RTO contracts. While bpm'online is available both as an aPaaS and an on-premises solution, the workload cannot be balanced in a hybrid way. It also has no native subtenancy capability.
■ Reference customers for bpm'online indicated a larger than average proportion of projects taking from six to nine months, when the market average is three months. Its reference customers gave it below-average scores for ease of deployment.
Caspio Caspio offers Caspio Bridge, a database-centric no-code hpaPaaS offering. Founded in 2000, Caspio was a market pioneer with its cloud application platform for citizen developers and business power users using model-driven graphical design tools and a metadata interpreter at runtime. Caspio is one of the most long-established vendors in the market today.
Caspio Bridge is available as both a public service and a virtual private service running in multiple worldwide locations on AWS infrastructure, and has thousands of user organizations. Pricing is multitiered based on the resources required, such as the amount of data stored or API calls made,
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and whether on public, compliance or private clouds. Caspio is based in Santa Clara, California, U.S.
Note: Caspio participated in the research process for this Magic Quadrant but we were unable to survey Caspio customer references within our time frame. Customer data is therefore based on briefings and other credible sources, including customer inquiries, Gartner Peer Insights reviews and other publicly available information.
Strengths
■ Caspio Bridge targets business users (aka citizen developers) building data-oriented applications. Its built-in visual tools facilitate the design and creation of table structures, relationships, triggers, authentication rules and roles. These tools enable users to create various interfaces for applications, such as forms, reports and search fields, and to customize application styling, localization and deployment. As a result, applications can be built quickly, with little or no involvement from IT staff.
■ Caspio Bridge's compliance editions provide complete data encryption and audit logs for enterprise customers striving to meet their unique data protection and governance requirements. For example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)- compliant edition meets U.S. requirements for the storage and use of protected health information and personally identifiable information. Caspio partners with Zapier for integration requirements.
■ Caspio Bridge has a significant installed base, with 3,000 paying customers across more than 100 countries. Its customers also span a wide range of vertical market segments.
■ Caspio's technical architecture is based on the established and proven technology of Microsoft SQL Server databases running on AWS infrastructure. This helps deliver reliability and quality of service at a low price point.
Cautions
■ Caspio only offers some customization abilities, such as JavaScript extensions, although it does provide integration connectors including for Zapier. Caspio specializes in relational-database- centered applications built by citizen developers, rather than on the wider set of capabilities desired for enterprise digital business applications.
■ Caspio Bridge has minimal capabilities in leading-edge business innovations such as the IoT, event processing, analytics (except data visualization component), SaaS independent software vendor (ISV) subtenancy, API management, process orchestration and decision management, and conversational user experience. This limits the platform to the more basic use cases.
■ Caspio has a very large nonpaying user base compared with many of its competitors. Caspio must manage the volatility of non-revenue-generating customers versus its commercial offering.
■ Caspio's default support offering is 24/5, implying a focus on applications for departmental or small organization use, rather than business-critical and larger enterprise use.
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Fujitsu RunMyProcess (RMP), which was founded in 2007, launched its PaaS offering in 2008 to target small or midsize businesses (SMBs) in EMEA. RMP was acquired by Fujitsu in 2013, to be incorporated into its strategic MetaArc initiative as part of Fujitsu's broader technology portfolio. RMP has a strategic role as an enabler for digital transformation projects. It helps organizations build new (Mode 2) digital applications that integrate with existing (Mode 1) IT systems. In the longer term, Fujitsu intends for RMP to drive transformation deeper into its value chains, through initiatives such as digital business composition, service marketplaces and collaborative ecosystems. For delivery, RMP leverages Fujitsu's global system integration capabilities.
RMP is both a no-code and low-code hpaPaaS offering. It is available in the cloud only, and across multiple regions (using the Fujitsu K5 cloud infrastructure service in Japan, and AWS outside Japan). RMP is developed in Paris, France; Fujitsu is based in Tokyo, Japan.
Note: Fujitsu only partly participated in the research process for this Magic Quadrant; it identified no reference customers and did not respond to some requests for information. Gartner's analysis of Fujitsu in this Magic Quadrant is therefore based on briefings and other credible sources, including customer inquiries, Gartner Peer Insights reviews and other publicly available information.
Strengths
■ Fujitsu RMP offers a high-productivity cloud application environment which has recently had its development environment redesigned. RMP focuses on quick and easy building of composite applications using multiple kinds of resources; for example, helping customers to automate processes or create responsive mobile experiences. It supports both citizen and professional developers.
■ Fujitsu RMP has strengthened its on-premises integration capabilities to improve its bridge to existing business applications such as SAP and Oracle via a rebuilt Secure Enterprise Connector (SEC). RMP also supports REST API-based integrations, with API creation and drag- and-drop API integration flow modeling for multisourced logic and data service aggregation.
■ Fujitsu RMP provides process-oriented, model-based design of business applications — covering web and mobile apps, processes, integration flows and APIs, and providing a business user's perspective of these functional capabilities.
■ Fujitsu RMP has succeeded in reaching large enterprise customers and has increased its partnerships. Fujitsu is deemed to offer good support, based on general customer feedback.
Cautions
■ Fujitsu's RMP customer base is still limited and not growing much, while the value of the business generated remains comparatively low. Net new customer adoption is much lower than the market average, despite the increased reach to large enterprises.
■ Fujitsu RMP use cases are primarily limited to workflow (process) automation or application composition, not in general application development itself — as indicated by the included
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database support, which is just NoSQL (that is, nonrelational). External data sources are, however, supported.
■ Fujitsu RMP provides some innovative technologies for integration purposes (such as API management and ML), but this means RMP is less focused on simpler departmental or stand- alone data-oriented applications. RMP's focus continues to lie across the combination of disciplines — of applications, integrations and processes.
■ Fujitsu RMP customers in general voice concerns regarding the necessary learning curve, despite the vendor's claim for quick development and ease of use through an intuitive developer interface.
Kintone Kintone, part of Japan's Cybozu that was founded in 1997, focuses on facilitating employee collaboration through the development of no-code applications for and by line of business (LOB) business users or citizen developers. Kintone is the name of both the company and its hpaPaaS offering, and was launched in 2011. Kintone has executed a rebranding — with its logo changed to focus on emotion, rather than function — and has put the U.S. market at the center of its ambitions, with some evidence of initial success.
The Kintone platform is available in the cloud only, and is shifting from Cybozu infrastructure to AWS; it is priced per user. Kintone is based in San Francisco, California, U.S. and Tokyo, Japan.
Strengths
■ Use of Kintone is characterized by rapid web-based data application development through easily configurable application generation from Microsoft Excel spreadsheets (including importing spreadsheet data). This is combined with drag-and-drop visual composition from a selection of more than 100 ready-made apps. The hpaPaaS solution supports end-user collaboration through a rich user experience that enables data sharing and workflow automation.
■ Kintone has more than 8,000 paying organizations in its subscription base, continuing its high growth of more than 80% during the past 12 months. Notably, Kintone succeeded in doubling its North American customer base to 200 organizations during 2017. Hundreds of partners and thousands of developers play a major role in Kintone's success.
■ Kintone is working to enhance scalability and service availability (and avoid planned downtime), to improve performance, and to provide more sophisticated integration connectors to more external services such as SaaS, business intelligence services and AI. The integration rework is being achieved through global iPaaS partners (such as Zapier and Microsoft Flow), and through improvements in the API, data (enhanced with Elasticsearch) and infrastructure.
■ According to its reference customers, Kintone's end-user experience is above average. Outside Japan, Kintone's business model is to operate primarily through its direct channel, targeting LOB business users and IT divisions.
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Cautions
■ Kintone's no-code capabilities come from the availability of ready-made apps and simple applications. Additional custom development, or extending the ready-made apps, requires professional JavaScript developers in order to construct any complex or sophisticated applications. However, external application development (AD) toolsets or DevOps support does not exist. This limits interest from larger enterprises desiring more complex applications.
■ Kintone's AD functionality is currently limited, with, for example, no AI-assisted/enabled-AD features being planned as yet. AD-related enhancements are expected to be a focus only from 2019.
■ The number of Kintone's resources and partners outside Japan is still very limited, with almost no presence in EMEA.
■ Kintone's "cloudiness" is still under development, since its usage of IaaS features is limited to basic support. Kintone's focus through 2019 is on rehosting its service onto public IaaS (AWS) instead of its parent company Cybozu's own cloud environment. Further cloud features await the completion of this transition.
Kony Kony continues to be one of a select group of independent app development platforms enabling development for mobile and desktop web in addition to emerging endpoint experiences such as conversational platforms, wearables and IoT-driven solutions. Its hpaPaaS solution has two primary components: Kony Visualizer for front-end development and Kony Fabric for back-end services. This is a model-driven platform with a metadata-based object layer. The Kony Visualizer tool provides a no-code/low-code environment suitable for citizen development as well as professional application development.
The Kony offering includes AppVantage, AppPlatform and AppFactory. These components target companies that need an app built, deployed and managed. The AppPlatform delivers the tools needed to build professional applications, and AppFactory brings the additional capabilities to manage a large portfolio of apps at scale. Kony is based in Austin, Texas, U.S.
Strengths
■ The Kony platform supports architectural flexibility. Deployment can be PaaS or on- premises/own cloud, mixed high-control and high-productivity. The Kony Fabric back end is only loosely coupled to the Kony Visualizer front-end tooling, giving developers flexibility to use others' tools as they choose.
■ Kony continues to augment the capabilities of its development platform with support for emerging endpoints such as conversational interfaces and wearables, to deliver a strong hpaPaaS tool that can accommodate citizen developers and professional developers.
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■ The Kony Fabric cloud platform, in conjunction with Visualizer, offers an object layer that facilitates easy integration with temporary data sources which can easily be remapped to existing data resources once the app is finalized via a metadata mapping layer.
■ Kony's reference customers all viewed their use cases as being entirely enterprise applications, and scored the company better than average when considering the ability to reduce time to market for app development. The company was seen as a strategic partner more often than with other platforms in this Magic Quadrant, and architectural flexibility was shown through the highest proportion of references using external cloud databases.
Cautions
■ Kony is still perceived as primarily a mobile app development platform (MADP), although this is slowly changing. All reference customers referred to it as a PaaS solution for mobile UIs. The company is midsize among hpaPaaS providers, and as such lacks the resources of larger vendors.
■ Kony has not yet succeeded in implementing the strong channel strategy desired to provide a partnership-led breakout in growth. Recent global channel partnerships are promising, but as yet unproven.
■ Kony has a high proportion of organizations using, but not paying for, its hpaPaaS solution. While this strategy encourages adoption, the company needs to put more emphasis on converting these organizations to paid customers, or risk lagging in growth compared with the overall market.
■ Kony's reference customers scored its return on investment as slightly lower than the average for this Magic Quadrant. It also came out as slightly below average in terms of being recommended for future hpaPaaS projects. Kony's client references tended to select the platform more for strategic partnership reasons compared with other vendors. Also, projects whose delivery times were less than three months were rarer for Kony than for any other platform in the Magic Quadrant.
MatsSoft MatsSoft, established in 2007, provides a low-code hpaPaaS called MATS that originally targeted BPM-type applications. MatsSoft's acquisition by Netcall, a company specializing in call center software, was announced in August 2017.
MATS is available as both a public and private cloud offering for citizen developers, and is offered on AWS (preferred by most of its customers), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute, or colocated equipment. Pricing is based on users, cases, projects, full enterprise implementation, and custom contracts based on "reward share" of ROI benefits. MatsSoft is based in Bedford, U.K.
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Strengths
■ The recent acquisition by Netcall provides MatsSoft with cross-selling opportunities and more critical mass. As a part of its combined product roadmap, the plan is to provide low-code extensibility to the Netcall product range of contact center solutions.
■ MatsSoft's focus on specific sectors, such as health and government, together with integration with Netcall's call center platform, makes it relatively appealing. Netcall and MatsSoft are targeting joint solutions, such as Patient and Citizen Engagement hubs, to cater to these segments. It has also successfully achieved rapid growth with its PaaS offering, and successful penetration of the North American market (now its largest region for PaaS customers).
■ The company offers many innovative pricing model options to make it easier for customers to get started. For example, the case-based pricing model charges you on the basis of transaction volume, and the reward share model is based on a joint evaluation of your cost savings.
■ MatsSoft's reference customers reported that they were "extremely likely" to use MATS for future projects, and were "satisfied" or "extremely satisfied" with the platform in meeting their expected outcomes.
Cautions
■ MatsSoft remains a small vendor despite its recent acquisition. Its traditional focus on BPM use cases and business practices is indicated by still requiring a setup charge for initiating services in some circumstances, and having a high proportion of professional services in its revenue.
■ Professional developers requiring 3GL for precise customizations and more complex use cases are not well catered for, although tools for professional developers are on the roadmap. For example MatsSoft recently delivered a custom-code API that helps in the building of JavaScript plugins (delivered in version 10).
■ Customers may find limited use of the platform in developing high-end, customer-facing applications, due to the platform's heavy inclination toward the workflow-oriented applications commonly observed in business-to-employee (B2E) use cases. MatsSoft is, however, addressing this with some improvements in its most recent version.
■ Although MatsSoft provides integration with enterprise systems such as Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Salesforce, and some cloud services, reference customers pointed out concerns with a lack of adequate integration features.
Mendix Mendix is an established (2005) pure-play, low-code hpaPaaS provider offering cloud-native architecture and capabilities. The Mendix Web Modeler together with the Atlas UI framework offers both professional developers and, to a lesser degree, citizen developers interested in high- productivity, a model-driven visual development environment generating metadata that is interpreted at runtime. Mendix also offers an additional integrated development environment (IDE) for professional developers to complement and extend the low-code development tools. Mendix's
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low-code modeling tool supports sophisticated data-driven, event-driven and process-oriented applications.
Mendix is deployed on AWS and supports Cloud Foundry and Docker images. The company has distribution partnerships with SAP and IBM. Mendix is investing heavily in growing its business and has 4,000 customers using its free community edition. Priced editions are tiered by numbers of users, although a single-app license is also available. Mendix was founded in the Netherlands and its current headquarters is located in Boston, Massachusetts in the U.S.
Strengths
■ Mendix's partnerships with SAP and IBM allow these megavendors to sell the Mendix platform as part of their overall solutions. While these partnerships are both relatively recent, the SAP partnership has begun to yield strong results for Mendix and the additional sales channels position it well for future success.
■ Support for Cloud Foundry and the Docker/Kubernetes container architecture enables Mendix to offer a cloud presence on AWS in addition to the SAP cloud and IBM cloud platforms. The Mendix platform is well-positioned to support hybrid computing models — due to its support of on-premises, virtual private cloud and multitenant public cloud. The Mendix platform has vertical and horizontal autoscaling and offers robust high availability, with very low latency, for failover across multiple availability zones.
■ The Mendix platform incorporates "nanoflows," delivering offline support for edge devices with native widgets for improved performance on mobile devices. This is a potential advantage for the Mendix platform in the emerging IoT segment.
■ Reference customers gave Mendix high scores for its functional capabilities when citing the reasons why they had decided to license the platform. Customers also cited the ability of the Mendix platform to reduce time to market and to drive innovation.
Cautions
■ Mendix's aggressive investment translates to a business that has yet to achieve profitability.
■ While Mendix has a large base of users for the free version of its platform, it still needs to convert these users to paying customers. This is somewhat mitigated by the automation of free user management and the low resource costs involved (per app per year).
■ Although Mendix is growing its business rapidly, as an independent platform vendor it faces challenges from the large PaaS vendors that are also ramping up their hpaPaaS capabilities. In particular, its partnerships with two megavendors may cause questions regarding its long-term independence.
■ Mendix's reference customers scored the company slightly below average for overall rating of services, and for value for the money spent.
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Microsoft Microsoft is a new entrant to hpaPaaS based on its PowerApps tool, launched in late 2016 for development on Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. PowerApps provides a drag-and-drop, citizen developer-focused canvas to build apps that access the Microsoft Common Data Service (also used by Microsoft Dynamics) as the hpaPaaS back-end. PowerApps is also tightly coupled with Microsoft Flow for simple integration SaaS (iSaaS) integrations, and connects with Azure Functions for more complex, external business logic and event-based workflows.
PowerApps runs on the Microsoft Azure public cloud, which has global locations and supports localization to 42 languages. It is licensed based on per user per month, but also per app maker or administrator per month. It has reached the top three in the hpaPaaS market, in terms of numbers of paying customers, in its first year. Microsoft is based in Redmond, Washington, U.S.
Strengths
■ PowerApps is the successor to Microsoft InfoPath and the Access web development tools. The tool offers a rich development canvas on which to build, starting from the UI layer, with ability to easily add app logic, validation and expressions, without coding.
■ PowerApps works seamlessly with Microsoft Flow iSaaS for data integration with external applications and systems via JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and XML, and with more than 200 out-of-the-box connectors. It also works with Power BI for citizen data analytics. PowerApps can also incorporate Azure Functions as building blocks in the design canvas in order to build event-driven and composite apps.
■ In a relatively short time, Microsoft has amassed a large customer base of more than 213,000 organizations, albeit with only 1 million monthly active users. The use of PowerApps to extend Microsoft SaaS products, such as Dynamics 365 and SharePoint, shows ambition beyond the simple office app use case.
■ The end-user experience of PowerApps was scored higher than average by Microsoft's reference customers. It supports the creation of responsive web apps, as well as hybrid mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows, by using the Apache Cordova mobile container. Offline data synchronization and transactions will be added through the integration of Dynamics 365.
Cautions
■ The overall PowerApps platform is relatively new, with the introduction of PowerApps and Common Data Service occurring in 2016, and initially competing at the low end of the hpaPaaS market.
■ Organizations that are not Microsoft-centric, particularly ones without investments in Office 365 or Microsoft SaaS, may not find the PowerApps platform to be compelling, since these deeper product integrations maximize the value of the platform.
■ While the canvas-based apps approach targets business citizen developers, customer references for Microsoft revealed that most of their app creators were either professional or specialist developers, which indicates a higher level of technical ability required to use the tool.
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Customers also gave Microsoft lower-than-average scores for technical documentation and user community support.
■ Reference customers for Microsoft also gave poor satisfaction scores for contract flexibility and adaptability. While licensing costs for PowerApps may initially seem simple, increased complexity with additional Microsoft services could make it difficult to predict and manage.
Oracle Oracle offers two distinct hpaPaaS solutions. One, the data-first Schema Service, is the cloud service rendition of its longstanding Application Express (APEX) — a data-centric graphical application design environment that executes as stored procedures in the address space of its underlying and bundled Oracle DBMS. The other, is the low-code, API-centric Visual Builder Cloud Service (VBCS), a newly developed model-driven hpaPaaS solution that executes generated JavaScript/HTML and can be extended using the Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET).
Both Visual Builder and Schema Service are available in Oracle's public cloud, and with Oracle Cloud at Customer for on-premises private cloud deployment. Oracle Cloud data centers are available worldwide. Oracle is based in Redwood Shores, California, U.S.
Strengths
■ Oracle has a major installed base of on-premises application platform technology users, many of which are in strategic long-term relationships with Oracle. This legacy provides Oracle with a major channel for extension into the aPaaS market. Proven marketing, sales and engineering organizations give Oracle the capacity to lead in this market.
■ Oracle offers a broad collection of cloud services, including a network of IaaS data centers, a suite of PaaS capabilities and a portfolio of SaaS offerings, plus the support of hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments with Cloud at Customer. VBCS is designed to access these capabilities via APIs, and Oracle's innovative consumption-based portfolio pricing should encourage multiple use cases.
■ Oracle is ahead of most hpaPaaS competitors in supporting development of AI/ML-assisted conversational chatbots, including specialized mobile digital twins and interaction with popular consumer voice services such as Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri. The pairing of the data-centric and process-centric platform services supports a broader set of options than most competitors. Visual Builder supports access to the separately priced Oracle event hub, messaging, process and IoT cloud services, which enables creation of advanced event-driven applications.
■ Oracle's reference customers expressed high levels of overall satisfaction. They noted the advantage of a broad integrated solution and praised the ability to deliver new and changed outcomes quickly and with good levels of monitoring and management. References gave their highest scores for capabilities such as mobile user experience, composition and integration capabilities, and overall functional depth.
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Cautions
■ Oracle appears on few hpaPaaS selection lists, according to the reference customer survey, indicating challenges in hpaPaaS market mind share. For some Oracle customers, their past experiences with Oracle's costs, contract negotiation practices and support quality means their transition to cloud results in considering other cloud service providers.
■ Most advanced capabilities in the Oracle cloud service portfolio have additional costs and are accessed via REST APIs. For some customers, the initially simple low-cost hpaPaaS can evolve into one of greater complexity and higher cost as additional services are added for desired functionalities, although this may be mitigated through the Universal Credits approach to charging.
■ Compared with the market leaders, not enough Oracle hpaPaaS adoption stems from its community of SaaS ISV partners. Without a vibrant partner ecosystem, its growth in the hpaPaaS market will be more challenging and competition is likely to be more difficult.
■ Oracle's reference customers for its hpaPaaS solutions were relatively small organizations. They scored its overall functional capabilities and DevOps as lower than average. Also scoring lower than average were the high-productivity indicators of ease of use for developers, deployment, and developer collaboration, which means Oracle continues to have challenges in the high- productivity arena.
OrangeScape OrangeScape, founded in 2003, offers an hpaPaaS solution called KiSSFLOW. It started as a workflow solution in Google Apps for G Suite customers in 2012, and became available for general non-G Suite use in 2014. KiSSFLOW is a cloud-based platform that is primarily used by citizen developers to create process-centric applications. The no-code experience allows citizen developers to extend predefined applications, and create new ones, through drag-and-drop capabilities.
The KiSSFLOW service is offered on a subscription basis, priced on a per-month per-user basis. Mobile apps developed on KiSSFLOW can be deployed on Android and iOS. OrangeScape is based in Chennai, India.
Strengths
■ KiSSFLOW is designed for citizen developers who prefer drag-and-drop creation and visual layout for designing their application flow. This is further complemented by a rich UI for development and extensions to presupplied apps, as well as an apps marketplace.
■ KiSSFLOW offers simple, one-tiered competitive pricing with provision for custom bulk pricing and special pricing for education and not-for-profit organizations.
■ KiSSFLOW offers integration with Zapier, an iSaaS vendor, which helps overcome feature limitations of the platform and provides extended data integration.
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■ OrangeScape has a sharp focus on customer support and claims its median response time to be approximately 34 minutes, which is good among smaller vendors. It also keeps its product roadmap transparent and prioritizes features based on its customers' wish lists.
Cautions
■ Customers looking for powerful PaaS capabilities to develop customer-facing complex applications with a rich UI may be disappointed, due its sharp focus on process-centric use cases, which are mostly employed by organizations in internal workflows. However, OrangeScape is planning to broaden its scope and move beyond workflow-based applications.
■ OrangeScape targets citizen developers only. It will not be able to satisfy ad hoc and professional developers, who may be looking for scripting capabilities for implementing slightly complex algorithms or building SaaS applications on top of the KiSSFLOW platform.
■ Although KiSSFLOW provides support for camera, geolocation and mobile app development, it lacks native support for digital business technologies such as IoT, AI and others — which increasingly appear on the innovation roadmaps of progressive hpaPaaS providers.
■ The KiSSFLOW platform does not offer industry-specific customizations, which would be particularly attractive to companies looking to build domain-specific applications.
OutSystems OutSystems offers an hpaPaaS solution that supports cloud deployments including AWS, Microsoft Azure and OutSystems' own options of public cloud, virtual private cloud and on-premises implementations. The OutSystems platform uses a metadata-driven model, where applications are developed using an extensible, low-code visually integrated development environment.
OutSystems has a large customer base spanning multiple geographies. Pricing for the OutSystems platform is tiered on the scale of users, and includes a free starter option. The company was founded in 2000 in Lisbon, Portugal, but its current headquarters is located in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Strengths
■ The OutSystems platform offers a comprehensive visual modeling capability, including business processes, integration workflows, UIs, business logic, data models, web services and APIs. These enable high-productivity development and a faster time to market for relatively advanced applications. The platform also includes many other services, such as project management and analytics.
■ OutSystems' customers have extensibility options, yet can also avoid lock-in by generating application source code and then deploying and managing it separately. This unique proposition offers a degree of assurance, should the customer find the need to migrate off the OutSystems platform in the future.
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■ OutSystems' support for multiple public cloud providers includes subtenancy features. This flexibility positions OutSystems well for hybrid deployments where enterprises want to migrate applications at their own pace. The platform also supports high-control DevOps stacks, and can deploy to Docker within container platforms such as Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry. The platform also features both horizontal and vertical autoscaling.
■ OutSystems' reference customers scored the platform as above average for productivity and ease of deployment. They selected OutSystems for its vision and innovation, and OutSystems customers were building more systems of innovation than those of any other vendor in this Magic Quadrant.
Cautions
■ OutSystems is an independent platform vendor and does not have the resources that larger vendors can leverage. Large PaaS vendors are increasing their investments in hpaPaaS, thereby posing a potential threat to smaller independent vendors.
■ OutSystems' support for AI services is limited to partnerships with third-party AI and ML vendors. This compares with some other vendors that have begun to offer these services as part of their own platforms.
■ OutSystems continues to achieve revenue growth; however, its reported customer numbers have not increased as much as might be expected. This indicates a transition to larger enterprises, which may allow its competitors to gain a greater foothold in the market.
■ OutSystems' reference customers' aggregated scores were slightly lower than the average for end-user experience. Also, the proportion of references that would like to see an improvement in cost was greater than the average for this Magic Quadrant.
Pegasystems The Pega Platform is an hpaPaaS, available since 2010, that allows application authors to create both simple and complex applications through different interfaces. Pega Platform offers a unified set of process orchestration, decision management, integration and user experience capabilities that also underpin its CRM SaaS applications and BPM heritage. It offers two design experiences that work with the same metadata model. Pega Express is a simplified design experience that enables LOB application authors to quickly model the process and UI for an application. To add more complex behavior, authors can use the Pega Designer Studio and gain access to the full capabilities of the platform.
Pegasystems offers a feature-limited free 30-day trial of its service, in addition to paid subscription enterprise services with a per-user subscription model tiered by capability (Basic, Intelligence and Omnichannel). Pegasystems is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
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Strengths
■ The Pega Platform's dual design experiences — Pega Express for citizen developers and Pega Designer Studio for low-code authors — enable application developers to fluidly move between development modes as needed.
■ The Pega Platform manages interactions across a variety of different channels and service, and across multiple cloud infrastructure providers. Customer references for Pegasystems used its web, mobile, interactive voice response and chatbot channels.
■ Pegasystems and its partners offer a variety of industry and cross-industry solution accelerators, which increase how quickly and easily solutions can be deployed, as well as peer support via the Pega Discovery Network (PDN) online community. It also supports Cloud Foundry-based deployments and partners with the popular Pivotal Cloud Foundry high-control application platform.
■ Reference customers for Pegasystems scored Pega as higher than average for functional depth and completeness, and gave it near-highest scoring for its data, process and business logic functionality.
Cautions
■ While Pegasystems most often competes directly with other BPM/case management-centric vendors, it was not as commonly considered as an alternative to leading vendors' hpaPaaS services. As such, the vendor must be considered as in transition to the hpaPaaS market. Reference customers for Pegasystems primarily saw the Pega Platform as BPM, and generally used it for improving their business process outcomes.
■ The Pega Platform has traditionally been one of the more expensive services included in this evaluation, and recent changes to its pricing model have not yet improved customers' views. Reference customers tended not to have considered price as a key factor in platform selection, but did cite concerns with costs as well as experiences during contract negotiations. Historically, Pegasystems has charged extra for some advanced functionality of the platform — next-best-action recommendations, robotic process automation (RPA), mobile software development kit (SDK), UI mashup, and integration suite. The transition to simpler, more inclusive pricing, free trials, and free training indicate a transition to cloud vendor status, but new enterprise buyers need to remain watchful for extra charges.
■ Customer references for Pegasystems highlighted the end-user experience as an area for improvement. They also cited only modest levels of satisfaction with the ease of use of the design experience for citizen developers.
■ Compared with the other vendors in this Magic Quadrant, Pegasystems' customer references reported lower scores than average for their overall vendor experience. While all customer references indicated they would recommend the use of the service, Pegasystems had the highest percentage of those who would do so with qualifications.
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Quick Base After being fully divested from Intuit in 2016, Quick Base is now one of the top five hpaPaaS vendors in terms of both revenue and customers. Quick Base primarily targets business units, often for the replacement of office tools such as spreadsheets and legacy systems, and for the creation of apps without coding. Business citizen developers use the Quick Base visual platform interface, along with hundreds of prebuilt templates, in order to build forms and data analysis reports as well as process-automation apps.
Quick Base offers a multitenant, shared-resource, cloud-native architecture running on public AWS and its own U.S.-based data centers. It can be licensed based on three tiers of annual subscription plans, based on the number of named users and apps. Quick Base is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Strengths
■ Quick Base offers an intuitive, metadata-driven, point-and-click approach to creating data table definitions and relationships and to building forms, reports, charts and dashboards that are autogenerated as responsive web apps. It offers more than 900 prebuilt templates, built by partners and Quick Base to accelerate development by business users.
■ The Quick Base platform uses a proprietary in-memory database that will see more investment to address larger data loads and more complex analytics needs. The database is tightly integrated with the UI and other services that make up the platform, to abstract development of data services and managing transactions from business users. Its platform APIs provide web- based access to the data for use on other platforms and to integrate with data brokerage services.
■ Quick Base demonstrated strong viability as a profitable stand-alone company in 2017. It has a broad and deep customer base, with more than 6,000 customers worldwide across many industries, as well as an ecosystem of more than 50 partners contributing to its Exchange marketplace.
■ Quick Base garnered some of the highest reference customer satisfaction scores related to overall experience with the vendor, value of product, delivery and execution, and the delivery of the expected outcomes.
Cautions
■ By taking a purely no-code approach to its platform, Quick Base does not target enterprise IT professional developers. This may pose challenges during its evaluation by larger enterprises, as they are early in cultivating IT relationships. Support for an external DevOps toolchain is lacking, and there is limited participation in the open-source communities favored by professional developers.
■ Although it creates responsive web apps that run on mobile browsers, Quick Base lacks out-of- the-box support for building native mobile apps and has been slower to implement this
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capability into the platform than other vendors. It currently relies on partners to help fill this gap in its offering.
■ Quick Base offers limited native integration support capabilities for interaction with third-party systems and applications. Quick Base Sync offers connectors to popular SaaS applications, such as Zendesk, Salesforce and others, but bringing in other external data requires the use of CSV files, API-level integrations, or third-party integration tools. Quick Base partners with Workato, an iSaaS vendor, for deeper customer integration needs.
■ Quick Base has not demonstrated as much visionary advancement in its platform as its peers. Reference customers rarely cited platform vision as a reason for purchasing Quick Base, and gave it poor satisfaction ratings for supporting new technologies such as AI and IoT. This is due to its primary focus on enhancements that simplify the process for citizen developers to build apps.
Salesforce Salesforce is a pioneer of cloud computing, having introduced hpaPaaS in 2008 — originally as Force.com, and since 2017 as the Lightning Platform. Salesforce's popular SaaS offerings and early commitment to cloud have generated momentum and market presence for its hpaPaaS solution, which together with its high-control aPaaS (Heroku) forms the Salesforce Platform. Lightning Platform is multitenant and consists of: a modular user experience development platform (Lightning); the legacy web application development platform (Visualforce); a Java-like fourth- generation language (Apex); and a relational DBMS. Runtime execution is entirely by metadata interpretation.
Lightning Platform is hosted on its own data centers on three continents and also experimentally at two AWS locations. Salesforce's app store (AppExchange) features more than 3,000 third-party application services. Salesforce is based in San Francisco, California, U.S.
Strengths
■ Salesforce's persistent double-digit revenue growth, name recognition, compatibility with its CRM SaaS, and partnerships with third parties put it on more hpaPaaS shortlists than most (though dominated by its existing SaaS customers).
■ Salesforce's innovations track and, in some cases, lead the market. They include the composable user experience development platform (Lightning); AI libraries for discovery, prediction and voice services; continuous team DevOps (Salesforce DX); and event-driven design (including IoT Explorer, platform events, and integration with Apache Kafka). Multicloud support is nascent, with plans announced for Google Cloud support.
■ Salesforce's established support for ISVs — through monetized AppExchange programs for partners, startups and incubators — continues to attract new SaaS partners. Salesforce's strategic investment in training and education (Trailhead and TrailheaDX) facilitates a growing community of developers (exceeding 4 million), further easing customer adoption.
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■ Salesforce reference customers are positive about the quality, availability, reliability and support of the Lightning Platform, praise its enterprise worthiness and value its user experience, especially for citizen developers. Vision and innovation are cited as leading reasons to select Salesforce.
Cautions
■ The architecture of Salesforce's core platform is mostly monolithic: it makes integration with other parts of the Salesforce portfolio more difficult, and complicates innovation.
■ Salesforce's cloud mantra of "no software" now challenges the completeness of its enterprise vision in strategic areas such as hybrid deployments and the IoT. IoT implementations extend partly to the edge. Mitigating this through partnerships with IoT edge specialists allows Salesforce to leverage IoT edge data, but limits its direct role in IoT success.
■ The emerging competition in hpaPaaS from the major cloud service and technology vendors is changing the dynamics of market. Salesforce's SaaS-first strategy weakens its platform market standing and may be insufficient to maintain its rate of growth in the long term.
■ Reference customers for Salesforce expressed concerns about the ease of deployment of Salesforce Platform solutions (Salesforce DX is focused to address this). Customers continue to object to the cost of using the company's platform services and the experience of contract negotiations. Nearly half of its reference customers relied on third-party iPaaS solutions to integrate with external cloud or on-premises applications, implying additional cost and risk to customers.
ServiceNow ServiceNow is widely known for its IT Service Management (ITSM) SaaS solution, which was originally developed as a sample application to highlight its application platform capabilities. The Now Platform, which has also been called CreateNow in the past, has been a stand-alone hpaPaaS since 2013. As ServiceNow sells its SaaS offerings to IT departments, it is easier for them to progress to application platform cross-sales than it is for their competitors who sell only to LOB units.
The Now Platform comprises all the platform services utilized by ServiceNow's SaaS offerings on a single platform, with an emphasis on workflow and integration in addition to app support. ServiceNow is investing heavily in advanced features such as chatbots, AI and mobile. The Now Platform is offered with several pricing models and can be made available on-premises, targeting primarily B2B and B2E applications including extensions to its SaaS offerings. ServiceNow is based in Santa Clara, California, U.S.
Strengths
■ ServiceNow's Now Platform provides workflow and system integration capabilities, with separate visual development environments for no-code and low-code developers. Its sophistication and maturity is indicated by its automated testing framework and security testing
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dashboard, and it continues to extend this with recent acquisitions in areas such as: mobile UI (SkyGiraffe); user experience (Telepathy); ML (DxContinuum); and chatbots (Qlue).
■ ServiceNow has a large ecosystem that includes 1,200 partners, of which more than 250 contribute to its accelerator programs for applications, components and integrations. These programs are ServiceNow Store, for free and monetized accelerators, and ServiceNow Share, which is more for developers to interact with their peers.
■ ServiceNow innovates in pricing by not charging for platform use during application development. This has contributed to a growth in customers of more than 40% over the prior year, and the rise of its Developer Program to more than 150,000 members.
■ Reference customers for ServiceNow scored it as consistently above average in integration and quality, reliability and availability, and for its monitoring and management capabilities.
Cautions
■ ServiceNow relies on shared hardware multitenancy, with dedicated software stacks, although customers can use subtenancy features on their own instance. This capability has the potential to increase the cost to ServiceNow and reduce its platform's profitability compared with other "SaaS plus PaaS" platforms, but should not impact the customer experience.
■ ServiceNow's business model includes charging extra for certain services, such as for real-time event processing and time-series event correlation through its Event Management and Operational Intelligence extensions and its MetricBase time-series database.
■ ServiceNow's mobile offering does not include offline modes. It's mobile capabilities are only due for enhancement once its SkyGiraffe acquisition has been assimilated. External DevOps tooling is not supported, and its reference customers scored it as lower than average for ease of deployment.
■ Reference customers for ServiceNow mostly considered the platform to be high-control rather than high-productivity, and the majority described it as a bpmPaaS solution. Fewer than the average number of developers (for this Magic Quadrant) were described as citizen or departmental developers. ServiceNow scored lower than average for prepurchase evaluation and contract negotiation, and for end-user experience — the latter particularly being called out as a requested improvement.
TrackVia TrackVia offers an hpaPaaS solution that is workflow-centric. Its focus, since 2006, has been to provide a unified and easy-to-use web and mobile platform for low-code developers that is extensible via managed JavaScript extensions.
TrackVia's cloud-native applications are deployed on AWS infrastructure and use an exclusively web-based integrated development environment (IDE) toolkit. It supports separate clouds for specific customers, such as for HIPAA and U.S. Government compliance. TrackVia is priced per user or per application, as required. TrackVia is based in Denver, Colorado, U.S.
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Strengths
■ The TrackVia process-oriented platform provides robust application development controls including a sophisticated user permission engine, which enables enterprise users to control user access down to the level of individual record details. It also provides rich auditing capabilities for full transparency of application transactions. TrackVia also supports a responsive, real-time reporting and data visualization engine, for charts and graphs.
■ TrackVia supports a variety of technical integrations to external systems, such as event-stream handling and IoT integration (with larger vendors such as AWS or GE) via REST services. Its native support for mobile application deployment, including offline support, also stands out from that of many of its competitors. Moreover, the overall service has operated at higher-than- average reliability relative to its competitors for the past three years.
■ TrackVia focuses on a complete out-of-the-box self-support experience. The majority of its reference customers quoted "automation of the software development life cycle" as either "excellent" or "outstanding," including its claimed quick failover support. The ease of use for developers and deployment was evaluated as being above average.
■ The majority of TrackVia's reference customers reported they were "very successful" in their development efforts and "extremely likely" to use the product again for future projects; feedback consistent with that received last year. The citizen developer experience, was scored as higher than average.
Cautions
■ TrackVia does not support internationalization features, which may limit its appeal to international SaaS-hosting providers and larger enterprises. This is accentuated by its small size and its only median revenue growth — much of which was from existing rather than new customers.
■ TrackVia offers minimal integration with external life cycle management tools — which limits its appeal to large teams working on large projects. Nearly half of its reference customers considered integration features to be an area of concern, and nearly half of respondents performed no integration at all with their TrackVia solutions.
■ A number of TrackVia's competitors provide commercial app stores/repositories, but TrackVia does not yet offer this service — an increasingly important one for building an ecosystem of users.
■ Consistent with last year, half or more of TrackVia's reference customers identified its pro- developer functional depth and completeness as being among their top concerns, and overall productivity was considered less of a strength versus its competitors. Most applications were departmental rather than enterprise. TrackVia's customers are predominantly in North America.
Zoho Zoho offers Creator, a database-centric hpaPaaS offering that complements its CRM, sales force automation and business productivity SaaS offerings. Zoho Creator targets business citizen
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developers with a drag-and-drop experience for forms and app creation, and also supports complex workflows through its proprietary Deluge script builder.
Zoho Creator is available as a public-cloud-hosted offering. It is licensed at a monthly subscription rate, based on either a per-user model or for unlimited users, with tiered apps and capacity. Zoho is based in Pleasanton, California, U.S.
Note: Zoho declined to participate in the research process for this Magic Quadrant; it identified no reference customers and chose not to provide supplementary information. Gartner's analysis of Zoho in this Magic Quadrant is therefore based on other credible sources, including previous vendor briefings, customer inquiries, Gartner Peer Insights reviews and other publicly available information.
Strengths
■ Zoho Creator is well-suited for citizen development use cases by providing drag-and-drop configuration of the metadata model used to build applications. Although not the most powerful hpaPaaS solution, citizen developers can build modestly complex business applications within the confines of the model.
■ Zoho Creator shows robust multichannel capabilities through native iOS, Android and Windows Phone apps deployed through its native app container. It also has out-of-the-box integrations for sending SMS messages using popular SMS providers.
■ Zoho Creator's pricing is very competitive, particularly for unlimited user models. Zoho suggests more than 2.5 million apps have been built using Zoho Creator.
■ Zoho has demonstrated its long-term viability as a privately owned business; operating for more than 20 years without any need for external funding.
Cautions
■ Zoho's reliance on scripting may slow the development and maintenance of more complex enterprise applications. Zoho Creator has no abstract metadata models for process automation, integrations and the more complex business logic. Instead, these parts of the application logic must be created using Zoho's Deluge scripting language.
■ Zoho Creator runs its own data centers in China, India, Europe, Singapore and the U.S., but offers no choice of infrastructure providers and is not suitable for customers looking to deploy hybrid or multicloud solutions.
■ Zoho Creator has limited data integration capabilities for bringing in data from third-party apps. It has some out-of-the-box integrations, but may require Deluge scripting or its partner Zapier for extended data integration. API management is also minimal on the platform.
■ Zoho Creator's in-house technical support is normally available only on a 24/5 basis (no weekend support), indicating a departmental rather than strategic focus. However, its partners can offer additional support programs at extra cost.
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Vendors Added and Dropped We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
Added The following vendors have been added to the Magic Quadrant this year:
■ AgilePoint
■ bpm'online
■ MatsSoft
■ Microsoft
■ OrangeScape
■ Pegasystems
Dropped No vendors have been dropped.
Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria To be included in this Magic Quadrant, vendors must offer (as of 1 September 2017) at least one platform that matches our criteria as listed below.
It must be a cloud service, with the following characteristics:
■ Available by subscription and accessible over internet technologies
■ Available uniformly to all qualified subscribers
■ Including some sharing of physical resources between logically isolated tenants (subscribers or applications)
■ Including some self-service provisioning and management by subscribers
■ Including bidirectional scaling without interruption of activities and with some automation
■ Including some instrumentation for resource use tracking
It has to be an application platform as a service (aPaaS) offering:
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■ It encapsulates the underlying virtual or physical machines, their procurement, management and direct costs, and does not require tenants to be aware of them (optional access is okay)
■ It delegates to the providers the patching, versioning and health of the platform stack
It has to provide a minimal set of aPaaS capabilities:
■ Support for the deployment of applications utilizing data schema and application logic
■ Includes tools to develop, version, test, deploy, execute, administer, monitor and manage the applications and their relevant artifacts
■ Enables the invocation of other external or third-party services
It has to provide hpaPaaS functionality:
■ It provides a low-code or no-code approach to application development
■ It supports development and deployment by citizen and professional developers
■ It includes single-step deployment
It has to be enterprise-grade and aimed at enterprise-class projects, by:
■ The provider taking some responsibility for:
■ High availability and disaster recovery
■ Security of access to application services
■ Technical support to paying subscribers
■ Enabling third-party application access to application logic and/or data via services
It has to be provided as a "stand-alone" service:
■ The platform's clients can subscribe to only the aPaaS capability and not to some other optional cloud service. For example, a SaaS application or another form of PaaS, such as IoT PaaS or BPM — of which the aPaaS capabilities are an "embedded" subset used to support the primary purpose of IoT or process management.
It has to be generally available, with more than 180 organizations as paying customers (as of 1 September 2017).
It has to generate an estimated revenue of at least $4.2 million, or equivalent, per year (that is, for the 12 months ending 31 August 2017).
Honorable Mentions The following vendors are not included in this research because they do not meet one or more inclusion criteria. They were, however, included in the hpaPaaS reference survey, are appropriate for certain situations, and sometimes compete against the vendors covered in this Magic Quadrant:
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■ Alpha Software
■ AppSheet
■ Bubble
■ Dell Boomi
■ DSI
■ GE Digital
■ Metavine
■ PMG
■ Simbla
■ Simplicité Software
■ Torus
■ WaveMaker
■ ZoomBIM
Evaluation Criteria
Ability to Execute
Vendors in Magic Quadrants are evaluated on two axes: Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. These relate to their performance in the year of our research (2017 in this case, because this research began in September 2017) and their vision for the following years. Vendors are scored according to the Gartner methodology for Magic Quadrants and these scores define each vendor's position. In each successive year, the evaluation criteria are changed as new technologies are defined, new markets addressed and new roadmaps created. Vendors are invited to provide the data for the evaluation criteria via questionnaires and briefings, but evaluations also include the results of Gartner customer surveys and analyst information from client inquiries.
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Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Product or Service High
Overall Viability Medium
Sales Execution/Pricing High
Market Responsiveness/Record Medium
Marketing Execution Medium
Customer Experience High
Operations Medium
Source: Gartner (April 2018)
To evaluate the Customer Experience criterion, Gartner confidentially surveyed vendor-supplied reference customers. At least seven references were required for the survey data to be considered for discussion in the Magic Quadrant. While the insights from references may not be statistically significant, they are still useful as feedback from vendors' customers.
To evaluate the Product or Service criterion (that is, the capabilities of a vendor's available enterprise hpaPaaS offerings) for the vendor's Ability to Execute, we examined the following 11 characteristics (with their associated weightings and content).
Note: Throughout this section, * denotes general interoperability and integration characteristics that any enterprise application platform should support. For an assessment of more advanced integration capabilities in specialist iPaaS solutions, refer to "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service."
1. Platform as a service (Weighting = Low)
Coverage:
■ Subscriber's self-service interface for provisioning, monitoring and management of platform and application instances, with uniform access by all qualified subscribers
■ Sharing of resources across tenants
■ Single master
■ Tenant isolation
■ Secure access
■ Bidirectional scaling, autoscaling, minimal unit of scaling
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■ Resource use tracking
■ Shielding users from operational responsibilities — for versioning, patching, health, virtualized infrastructure management/costs
■ Service pricing
2. Enterprise worthiness (Weighting = Low)
Coverage:
■ High availability
■ Disaster recovery
■ Real-time support
■ Multicloud support
■ Hybrid on-premises plus cloud support
■ High-volume throughput
■ Service-level agreements
■ Certification of platform or components
■ Exposure of application capabilities as services via APIs
■ Subtenancy
■ Internationalization
3. Mobile and multichannel support (Weighting = High)
Coverage:
■ Type of mobile app support
■ Mobile services support
■ Responsive UI
■ Multichannel applications
■ Multichannel user experience
■ Developer experience for simple UI
■ Developer experience for complex UI
■ IoT support
■ Behavioral analytics
■ Consumer-facing application support
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■ Creation of SaaS
4. Data, process and business logic functionality (Weighting = High)
Coverage:
■ Development of data services
■ Access to data in multiple formats
■ Access to managed documents
■ Data preloading and offloading
■ In situ schema changes
■ Data analytics services
■ Runtime data limits
■ Development of business processes
■ Process state management
■ Process monitoring and analytics
■ Development of business logic
■ Decision monitoring and analytics
■ AI support for advanced decisions
5. Citizen developer experience (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Simplified development environment
■ Simplified deployment mechanism
■ IT governance of citizen developers
■ Training
6. Back-end and integration development (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ API creation and management*
■ Integration support (data and application)*
■ Access to SaaS data and features
■ Identity services for authorization
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■ API economy services
■ Microservices (fully independent data-owning services)
■ Event-driven architecture (EDA)
7. Automation of software development life cycle (Weighting = High)
Coverage:
■ Design-thinking support
■ Requirements management
■ Support for repository and application versioning
■ Support for test-driven development
■ Integrated tooling for development
■ Support for AI-assisted development
■ Round-trip development between no-code and low-code development
■ Debugging services
■ Assurance of cloud features
■ Services repository and governance
■ One-button application packaging and deployment
■ Application performance monitoring
■ Policy for new hpaPaaS features
■ Training
8. Integration with external DevOps (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Support for planning tool integration
■ Support for development tool integration
■ Support for validation and verification integration
■ Support for release management integration
■ Support for external monitoring tools
9. Collaboration for developers (Weighting = Low)
Coverage:
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■ PaaS+ features of prebuilt apps
■ Development accelerators
■ Vendor validation of accelerators
■ Developer market
■ Multiple communities
■ Cooperative development features
10. Composite applications (Weighting = High)
Coverage:
■ Composite applications
■ Openness to platform integration
■ Access to near and far application APIs
■ Integrated high productivity and high control
■ Extensibility, including 3GL extensions
■ Use of an industry PaaS solution or container framework
11. Other hpaPaaS characteristics (Weighting = Low)
Coverage:
■ Digital twin
■ Batch processing
■ In-memory computing
■ Administration of development
■ Administration of deployment
■ Creation of SaaS
■ Support for "DigitalOps" (the digital business equivalent of DevOps — see "DigitalOps Helps Connect Business Models to the Digital Business Platform")
■ Support of standards (de facto or de jure)
■ Contributions to the open-source software components used in the aPaaS
■ Deployment domains and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates
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Completeness of Vision Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements about current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs and competitive forces, and how well they map to the Gartner position. Ultimately, technology providers are rated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunity for the provider.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria Weighting
Market Understanding High
Marketing Strategy High
Sales Strategy Medium
Offering (Product) Strategy High
Business Model Low
Vertical/Industry Strategy Low
Innovation High
Geographic Strategy Medium
Source: Gartner (April 2018)
To evaluate the Offering (Product) Strategy criterion (that is, the roadmap of a vendor's available enterprise hpaPaaS offerings) for the vendor's Completeness of Vision, we examined the following 11 characteristics (with their associated weightings and content).
Note: Throughout this section, * denotes general interoperability and integration characteristics that any enterprise application platform should support. For an assessment of more advanced integration capabilities in specialist iPaaS, refer to "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service."
1. Platform as a service (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Subscriber's self-service interface for provisioning, monitoring and management of platform and application instances, with uniform access by all qualified subscribers
■ Sharing of resources across tenants
■ Single master
■ Tenant isolation
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■ Secure access
■ Bidirectional scaling, autoscaling, minimal unit of scaling
■ Resource use tracking
■ Shielding users from operational responsibilities — for versioning, patching, health, virtualized infrastructure management/costs
■ Service pricing
2. Enterprise worthiness (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ High availability
■ Disaster recovery
■ Real-time support
■ Multicloud support
■ Hybrid on-premises plus cloud support
■ High-volume throughput
■ Service-level agreements
■ Certification of platform or components
■ Exposure of application capabilities as services via APIs
■ Subtenancy
■ Internationalization
3. Mobile and multichannel support (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Type of mobile app support
■ Mobile services support
■ Responsive UI
■ Multichannel applications
■ Multichannel user experience
■ Developer experience for simple UI
■ Developer experience for complex UI
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■ IoT support
■ Behavioral analytics
■ Consumer-facing application support
■ Creation of SaaS
4. Data, process and business logic functionality (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Development of data services
■ Access to data in multiple formats
■ Access to managed documents
■ Data preloading and offloading
■ In situ schema changes
■ Data analytics services
■ Runtime data limits
■ Development of business processes
■ Process state management
■ Process monitoring and analytics
■ Development of business logic
■ Decision monitoring and analytics
■ AI support for advanced decisions
5. Citizen developer experience (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Simplified development environment
■ Simplified deployment mechanism
■ IT governance of citizen developers
■ Training
6. Back-end and integration development (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ API creation and management*
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■ Integration support (data and application)*
■ Access to SaaS data and features
■ Identity services for authorization
■ API economy services
■ Microservices (fully independent data-owning services)
■ Event-driven architecture
7. Automation of software development life cycle (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Design thinking support
■ Requirements management
■ Support for repository and application versioning
■ Support for test-driven development
■ Integrated tooling for development
■ Support for AI-assisted development
■ Round-trip development between no-code and low-code development
■ Debugging services
■ Assurance of cloud features
■ Services repository and governance
■ One-button application packaging and deployment
■ Application performance monitoring
■ Policy for new hpaPaaS features
■ Training
8. Integration with external DevOps (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Support for planning tool integration
■ Support for development tool integration
■ Support for validation and verification integration
■ Support for release management integration
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■ Support for external monitoring tools
9. Collaboration for developers (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ PaaS+ features of prebuilt apps
■ Development accelerators
■ Vendor validation of accelerators
■ Developer market
■ Multiple communities
■ Cooperative development features
10. Composite applications (Weighting = Medium)
Coverage:
■ Composite applications
■ Openness to platform integration
■ Access to near and far application APIs
■ Integrated high productivity and high control
■ Extensibility, including 3GL extensions
■ Use of an industry PaaS solution or container framework
11. Other hpaPaaS characteristics (Weighting = Low)
Coverage:
■ Digital twin
■ Batch processing
■ In-memory computing
■ Administration of development
■ Administration of deployment
■ Creation of SaaS
■ Support for "DigitalOps" (the digital business equivalent of DevOps — see "DigitalOps Helps Connect Business Models to the Digital Business Platform")
■ Support of standards (de facto or de jure)
■ Contributions to the open-source software components used in the aPaaS
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■ Deployment domains and SSL certificates
Quadrant Descriptions
Leaders Leaders in a market combine an insightful understanding of the realities of the market, a reliable record, the ability to influence the market's direction, the capability to attract and keep a following, and the capacity to lead.
In the enterprise hpaPaaS market, leadership implies an understanding of the demands of the enterprise and the opportunities of cloud computing, and a genuine commitment to enterprise cloud computing and support for digital business. A Leader must have demonstrated a market-leading vision and the ability to deliver on that vision. It must provide the set of services required by the enterprise in a public cloud offering, yet enable use by no-code or low-code developers. Only four vendors have sustained excellence in both execution and vision for long enough to demonstrate effective leadership: two SaaS-plus-PaaS vendors and two independent vendors. With continued growth from Challengers and Visionaries, we expect additional vendors to advance in this direction during the next three years.
Note that a Leader is not always the best choice for a particular enterprise initiative. A focused, smaller vendor can provide excellent support and commitment to individual customers — especially when geographic or vertical industry specifics, or the need for a certain capability and commitment to specific features or functions, are important. This more focused type of vendor would not be rated as a Leader in the overall hpaPaaS market, but within a specific segment it may well be treated as such. These market segments include process-centric and mobile-centric hpaPaaS today.
Challengers Challengers in a market excel in their ability to attract a large user following, but this ability is limited to a subset or segment of the market. For members of that target audience, Challengers can be treated as Leaders, but such specificity presents a barrier to adoption for those outside that segment.
In the enterprise hpaPaaS market, a Challenger may have a strong proven presence or following in the citizen developer end of the market, but lack traction, commitment or sophistication in the broader enterprise market. A Challenger must demonstrate a sustained excellence in execution and must have amassed a significant following, which is hard to achieve in this new and still-evolving market. One vendor is rated as a Challenger in the enterprise hpaPaaS market this year, which is indicative of the potential of megavendors.
A Challenger can evolve into a Leader if it adopts aggressive, innovative strategies to expand to the full breadth of the target market, demonstrates exceptional insight in understanding IT market direction, and retains the capability to deliver on its vision. It may also evolve into a Visionary by sacrificing growth for new features and capabilities that are ahead of the market.
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Visionaries Visionaries in a market are innovators that drive the market forward by responding to emerging leading-edge customer demands and by offering the businesses of their customers' new opportunities to excel. Typically, these vendors appeal to leading-edge customers and may even have minimal mainstream presence or name recognition. Their ability to deliver sustained and dependable execution in the mainstream enterprise market is not sufficiently tested. Note that the vision of a vendor is not expressed only in its technological innovation; insightful understanding of market trends is also required for visionary marketing, sales, and product and business management strategies.
In the hpaPaaS market, the Visionary vendors include a classic enterprise software vendor, classic BPM vendors and a classic MADP vendor, indicating their transition to supporting the next generation of application developers. Generally, Visionaries are investing in leading-edge enterprise hpaPaaS services that are not yet readily adopted by mainstream enterprise customers. They support capabilities such as back-end services, advanced AI and chatbot capabilities, process, case and decision management, cloud-native architecture and strong ecosystems. Visionaries also excel in understanding the demands of the enterprise on the road to cloud adoption and support: ready customizations of SaaS; strong integration capabilities for composite application services; and hybrid deployment support.
Visionaries should eventually grow to become Leaders. Alternatively, they may limit their target markets to focus on their core competencies (or core technologies or existing customers) and become Niche Players, or mature their specialties and advance in execution to become Challengers.
Niche Players Niche Players in a market typically specialize in a vertical, geographical or functional area, therefore addressing only a segment of that market. Neither their execution nor their vision is market-leading from an enterprise perspective. Often, however, these vendors are in transition from or to other markets. They may also be subject to excessively conservative risk-averse leadership; startups making initial forays into success; or vendors with a specific focus on a subset of use cases.
In the enterprise hpaPaaS market, most Niche Players are simply focusing on the SMB market, or focusing on citizen developer models of application development, or transitioning from the BPM market segment. In the latter case, they will be adjusting marketing and functionality to match the hpaPaaS Leaders, and in particular addressing skill set requirements and UI capabilities.
Because of their relative specializations, Niche Players can often represent the best choice for a specific category of buyer, or for a particular use case. They typically offer specialized expertise, focused support practices, flexible terms and conditions, lower costs, and greater dedication to a particular market segment and its customers.
Some Niche Players are poised to improve their Ability to Execute and enterprise features and to evolve into Challengers. Others will discover innovative solutions that attract interest beyond their niche segments, and will emerge as Visionaries. Some will look to both strengthen and broaden
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their businesses in order to challenge the Leaders. In this fast-evolving and consolidating market, opportunities exist for all comers.
Context
The enterprise high-productivity aPaaS market is formed by vendors aiming to provide customers with a no-code to low-code cloud platform for the development and deployment of enterprise-class applications and services. But they avoid many of the traditional costs, risks and time scales of conventional pro-code application development approaches.
These hpaPaaS solutions enable the enterprise to utilize a full range of developer personas — citizen developers, departmental developers and enterprise IT professionals — and to develop applications that range from tactical to strategic, and stand-alone to integrated. Such applications will typically be data-oriented, although wider enterprise features such as IoT and event-driven support are becoming more common.
Use cases for hpaPaaS applications range from departmental applications (such as replacing local Microsoft Access and Excel-based workflows), through to enterprise platform replacement (swapping Java Platform Enterprise Edition [Java EE] for hpaPaaS, for example):
1. Cloud spreadsheet or local data replacement for B2E applications in a specific department or line of business: Office data automation tasks, sometimes extending to business processes. Usually web-based, but may include data constraints.
2. Extending SaaS applications: Exploiting the data and processes provided in a SaaS solution with new data fields, user experiences and business logic for B2E or B2B usage.
3. Informational or data collection applications for B2C: Extending application support to public or customer-facing websites, exploiting user experience features and cloud scalability at minimal development cost.
4. Modernization or replacement of legacy internal or third-party applications for B2E or B2B usage: Typically, replacing legacy document management and internal applications such as Lotus Notes by exploiting new user experience and business process capabilities.
5. Bimodal Mode 2 investigative application: Building user interfaces and data support for investigating new types of application and application development, such as AI/ML, often via third-party external cloud services.
6. Composite application services developed alongside high-control platforms or third parties: Building enterprise applications with some hpaPaaS technologies, or starting with an hpaPaaS "minimum viable product" and later expanding with other non-hpaPaaS services as needed.
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The hpaPaaS technologies extend create, read, update, delete (CRUD)-based data operations beyond simple web and form-based UIs, with access to external data and other services. They add mobile and other user experiences and, increasingly, additional capabilities such as event processing and AI/ML. Their RAD credentials ensure short time to market as well as a good fit with agile methodologies. They fit well with mesh app and service architecture (MASA) polyglot applications, providing user experience and stateful control of back-end services implemented using high-control aPaaS or other high-control options, or procured from third parties (see "Adopt a Multigrained Mesh App and Service Architecture to Enable Your Digital Business Technology Platform").
This research covers only the vendors with hpaPaaS offerings aimed at enterprise customers; within this category, however, vendors still differ — in many dimensions — in the way they interpret enterprise realities, requirements, opportunities and best practices in cloud computing. These dimensions are examined below.
Services Provided
Various hpaPaaS solutions offer the core services of UI, database, business process and business logic in various forms, depending on their legacy of RAD, BPM, cloud database or other.
■ User experience. The end-user experience can vary from simple schema-generated forms in fixed-format visual frameworks, through to near-pixel-perfect designs — for web, mobile and wearable displays as well as voice and chatbot interfaces.
■ Database handling. Data persistence varies from ad hoc NoSQL storage through to sophisticated entity-relationship modeling, inference of types and indexes from context, and multiple display paradigms.
■ Business logic. Handling of business logic is the challenge of no-code environments as it inevitably means some aspect of representing constraints and expressions. This can vary from Excel-type expressions, metadata for common data constraints, through to decision trees and models (such as DMN).
■ Business process. Orchestrating and choreographing display pages and process tasks, as well as human workflow, is much easier with graphical representations of various complexities up to and including BPMN and case management.
■ Graphics and analytics. With any volume of data comes the need to provide custom succinct and, ideally, graphical reporting as well as deeper analysis through analytics models. While the latter will tend to require specialized services, some basic analytical and reporting models may be provided in hpaPaaS solutions.
■ Real-time analytics and events. The more sophisticated digital business use cases will overlap with real-time data handling and event processing. For example, marrying real-time services such as geolocation from mobiles with other information sources occurring in real time and providing event process capabilities (or access to external specialized services).
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Developer Experience
■ No-code. A model- or form-driven graphical development environment, typically suitable for departmental and citizen developers, with limited configuration options for representing business logic, simple application flows, or accessing external services.
■ Low-code. A scripting or fourth-generation language (4GL) programming environment, often extending model- or form-driven development environments and utilizing a constrained language mechanism to provide business logic, complex application flows and data operations, as well as external service access.
Many hpaPaaS solutions also support pro-code extensions using JavaScript or 3GL languages, although the developer experience for these extensions will typically be provided outside of the hpaPaaS solution. They may also allow access to pro-code application development services such as external repository and testing services.
Model of Elasticity Used
■ Shared hardware. Multiple tenants may share the resources of a physical machine, but each VM is exclusively dedicated to one tenant. The increment of elasticity is the whole VM image: Isolation is implemented by the virtualization hypervisor; elasticity is implemented by additional control software. This is a relatively coarse model with a modest degree of resource sharing; however, the less sharing, the more assured is the tenant's isolation.
■ Shared OS. Multiple tenants share an instance of a virtual or physical server OS, each isolated via OS containers. The increment of elasticity is an instance of an OS container, which is more lightweight than a whole VM. This makes elasticity more fine-grained and responsive to changing demands as an OS container can be instantiated faster than a VM and can therefore be triggered faster in response to smaller changes in demand. Isolation is implemented via OS containers; elasticity is implemented by additional control software.
■ Shared container. Multiple tenants share an instance of an application container. The increment of elasticity can be a thread, a segment of real memory, a priority level or a database connector. Fine-grained elasticity is the most efficient in responding to changing demands and in the density of resource utilization. Tenant isolation and resource elasticity are implemented inside the application platform container; however, the more sharing, the harder it is to ensure tenant isolation.
Refer to "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy" for more details.
Scope of Deployment
■ Public. The aPaaS services are operated by the provider in the data center network of the provider's choice, or from a selection managed by the provider. Software that executes the application is unavailable for review or change, and is fixed and versioned exclusively by the provider (with the subscriber having some control over the timing of updates). The customer
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operates in logical isolation from other tenants, but shares some physical resources — reducing costs and improving the elasticity of the environment.
■ Hybrid. The provider of the public aPaaS also offers the software that enables its public service — as a software product that is deployed and managed on-premises or at a data center of the buyer's choice (including public IaaS). The software may not be 100% the same, but offers a choice of location for running the aPaaS applications, and may be offered on a cloud platform such as Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes. The vendor may retain a degree of control of the versioning of the software even if it does not control its day-to-day operations. It is not yet usual for vendors to provide a control mechanism offering deployment in one or the other — the latter is typically a high-control requirement rather than a high-productivity one.
Refer to "Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service, 2017" for more details.
Target Enterprise Personas
■ Departmental, LOB and citizen developers. An hpaPaaS solution targeting LOBs and citizen developers must offer ease of use and simplified references to application data and services. They offer high-productivity, model-driven design of UIs. Typically, LOB developers use these tools in conjunction with prebuilt accelerators or components, or to extend SaaS solutions. Enterprises are encouraging such developers as a means of addressing their backlog of departmental applications.
■ Professional developers. Any hpaPaaS solution targeting enterprise IT organizations must support enterprise IT development of application services, with the focus on rapid time to market. These may be standard data-oriented applications addressing application backlogs, or mixed agile teams with departmental or LOB developers, or composite applications of potentially greater complexity that can still be accommodated by some of the design patterns supported by hpaPaaS. Examples of professional developer hpaPaaS usage include:
■ Building a minimum viable product (MVP) for an agile-developed application, to be extended with either internally developed 3GL-based services, SaaS services, other PaaS- based services, or other services, as required.
■ Supporting a bimodal Mode 2 solution, with a focus on constructing investigative applications through rapid development of the data, user experience and easy accessibility to the other services being investigated — such as AI.
■ ISVs. A solution targeting ISVs for turnkey application development and SaaS customization is a key customer category for some hpaPaaS vendors. Where ISVs are developing their own SaaS offerings, the hpaPaaS solution needs to support subtenancy, because the objective of the ISVs is to sell their application services to independent customers (their tenants). Successful SaaS solutions can have ISVs whose clouds have thousands of tenants of their own. The support of subtenancy for ISVs includes features such as:
■ Tracking and billing per subtenant
■ Version control of the application that is seamlessly delivered to subtenants
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■ Management controls that allow the ISV to manage subtenants (including scaling, failover, backup/restore, noisy neighbor control and security)
■ Self-service management used by subtenants
Pricing Model
■ Free. Usually limited to developer (nonproduction) usage, with resource and support restrictions. Useful for proofs of concept, education and evaluation.
■ Fixed. Priced in proportion to the number of registered or login users, applications or both. These are often tiered by resource boundaries such as data objects, storage or some measure of application complexity. Users that are significantly under the use thresholds are paying a premium for predictable budget exposure, and relief from the burden of capacity planning and continuous use tracking. The pricing model and associated scale discounts are likely to vary considerably with scale of adoption.
Refer to "Reduce Costs of Custom Applications by Leveraging Public PaaS Pricing Models" for more details.
Users are advised to establish where an hpaPaaS offering sits, in relation to the above dimensions, when evaluating and contrasting vendor candidates. Although a given project may be more sensitive to some of these categories than others, all will have an impact on the overall experience of the subscriber in utilizing a selected service. Understanding this impact in relation to the project objectives is the responsibility of the buyer and should not be delegated to vendors or advisors. The consequences of a wrong choice can span the entire spectrum from negligible to severe.
Gartner observes that the effect of multicloud — that is, the adoption of multiple cloud services in parallel — often results in subscriptions to multiple hpaPaaS vendors per differing use cases and LOBs. It is increasingly incumbent on the central IT department to advise on the relative merits of available or new hpaPaaS offerings for particular use cases, in order to maximize utilization and value and reduce unnecessary overlap.
Market Overview The enterprise hpaPaaS market is growing fast as a significant and cloud-based part of the wider application platform market. Gartner sees that hpaPaaS adoption is extending into usage areas previously occupied by high-control aPaaS and more traditional application servers.
Application PaaS in general is part of the wider PaaS market, which remains the smallest of the three major cloud market categories (see "Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2015-2021, 4Q17 Update"). For 2017, we see that:
■ PaaS market revenue is $11.8 billion.
■ IaaS market revenue is $30.0 billion.
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■ SaaS market revenue is $60.2 billion.
Within the PaaS market, aPaaS is the second-biggest sector at $3.0 billion in revenue in 2017 (see "Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2014-2021, 4Q17 Update"). The majority of that revenue involves vendors in this Magic Quadrant: Salesforce alone contributed $1.8 billion in PaaS revenue, of which the majority pertained to its hpaPaaS offering.
Related and overlapping segments include:
■ Database PaaS ($3.1 billion for 2017)
■ MADPs ($1.3 billion for 2017)
■ BPM suites ($2.6 billion for 2017)
■ Integration PaaS ($1.1 billion for 2017)
Although we identify current Leaders in this hpaPaaS research, the long-term, sustained leadership in the market remains open to new players. New vendors continue to appear: Gartner counted 75 hpaPaaS vendors at the start of this research; now 85 and rising. Major IT vendors have already entered the market (such as Microsoft and Oracle) or are poised to (Google is in beta) — often in support of their SaaS business.
The hpaPaaS Magic Quadrant displays a diagonal bias from Niche Players to Leaders, representing two market factors:
■ The specialized features of citizen developer and BPM-focused hpaPaaS can be considered as a starting point, graduating toward the wider enterprise requirements of IT. The requirements for an LOB-oriented platform are a subset of those for an enterprise IT platform: the former focuses on independence from central IT; the latter is looking to accommodate the needs of centralized governance and more sophisticated application requirements. Note that all the hpaPaaS vendors in this Magic Quadrant provide some of these enterprise IT features.
■ The main use cases for hpaPaaS solutions involve data entry and reporting operations on data — ease of entering of information and ease of access to information. Some hpaPaaS solutions offer process management and support complex business logic; some BPM vendors are evolving to hpaPaaS, based on these requirements together with their strong integration capabilities. This means the depth of vision across vendors is more restricted when compared with many other Magic Quadrants. There are no qualifying vendors that exhibit particularly low execution and high vision, or high execution and low vision. In some ways, this reflects the maturity of the underpinning technologies — RAD tools have been available for decades.
Some of the key trends in the hpaPaaS market (see "The Key Trends in PaaS, 2018" for further details) are as follows:
■ The hpaPaaS market is positioning for succession over traditional precloud platform stacks such as Java EE and .NET application servers.
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We see hpaPaaS continuing to accelerate its relevance to enterprise IT, incorporating capabilities for 70% to 80% of IT application requirements (less for larger enterprises, more for smaller enterprises).
■ Platform convergence through hpaPaaS vendors starting to support more-sophisticated business logic, business process and user experience capabilities, and competing against specialist vendors for these areas.
Some of the vendors in the bpmPaaS market (such as AgilePoint, Appian and Pegasystems) and the RMAD market (such as Progress and Kony) are increasingly seeing themselves as competing with other hpaPaaS vendors for application development platforms. Some of these specialists are merging with hpaPaaS vendors through acquisition (for example, ServiceNow acquiring SkyGiraffe), while others find themselves competing for common hpaPaaS use cases.
■ The hpaPaaS platforms are evolving toward multifunction platforms supporting digital business initiatives.
As a consequence of hpaPaaS providing multiple services that can often be procured separately — as in xPaaS solutions such as database PaaS (dbPaaS) and application development PaaS (adPaaS) — we see the emergence of multifunction aPaaS wrapped in high- productivity tooling. An extreme example of this trend is the incorporation of integration technologies. For example, hpaPaaS vendors such as Fujitsu and TIBCO Software emphasize their composite application credentials, and Salesforce has announced the acquisition of integration tool vendor MuleSoft (announced but not completed at the time of writing). These multifunctional abilities align hpaPaaS for digital business innovations with time scales that suit business leaders and digital innovators.
■ New B2C — consumer and customer-facing — abilities open new opportunities for hpaPaaS.
While hpaPaaS has traditionally been associated with B2E and departmental applications, the emergence of sophisticated user experience capabilities has led to their usage in customer and public-facing applications increasing. Their success in B2C applications will complete their acceptance as "serious" application development tooling.
■ Megavendors are now addressing the hpaPaaS market as part of their "MegaPaaS" offerings.
Microsoft has already attained a near-top position in terms of numbers of paying customers for its PowerApps service, less than a year after general availability. Oracle Visual Builder Cloud Service is available, Google App Maker offering is in preview, and SAP and IBM have started to offer Mendix — with the former planning for it to be available on all the main cloud service providers. The adoption of hpaPaaS by these vendors is because their large enterprise customers are seeing value, and increasing adoption in line with the industry trend (see "Innovation Insight for Platform-as-a-Service Suites (MegaPaaS)").
■ The hpaPaaS market continues a strong association with SaaS; we now see the emergence of SaaS plus PaaS as a differentiated cloud offering.
Vendors such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle and SAP can be described as SaaS-plus- PaaS providers — offering SaaS business services with extensibility through hpaPaaS and other
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PaaS offerings. Microsoft announced, in March 2018, that PowerApps is the app platform for its Dynamics 365 SaaS solution. Non-SaaS vendors tend to be independents: some compete through providing their own PaaS-hosted applications as part of their "PaaS+" offerings (such as Kintone and OrangeScape); others rely on others' SaaS ecosystems, or focus on new application development. All hpaPaaS vendors provide various levels of their own ecosystems, plus varying levels of support for other cloud ecosystems: These include app stores, developer communities sharing templates and components, and partner services to assist with development or additional services.
■ Exploitation of lower levels of cloud frameworks and infrastructure by hpaPaaS vendors continues to gather pace.
Use of PaaS frameworks (such as Cloud Foundry) and equivalent cloud infrastructure software (such as Kubernetes-orchestrated Docker containers) is growing among hpaPaaS vendors. While such underpinnings are opaque to the users of hpaPaaS, they enable additional ecosystems of services, the reliability of cloud characteristics such as scalability, and additional deployment options — including hybrid on-premises and public cloud deployments. Examples here are Appian, Betty Blocks, Pegasystems, Mendix and OutSystems being optionally available on Cloud Foundry or Docker, or both.
■ Cloud-based RAD is synergistic — hpaPaaS reduces application development friction for increasing numbers of enterprises.
There is a correlation between high-productivity application development through RAD and vendor-managed cloud services. Together, they minimize the friction of application development and deployment by moving much administration and management of low-level services and software to a services model. The alternative of on-premises RAD still requires infrastructure and platform operations, whereas hpaPaaS enables instantly available developer services and near-instant deployments that match the application development performance goals and desires of the ever-increasing cadres of agile methodologists.
■ Modern IT initiatives such as digital business experimentation, as bimodal Mode 2 projects align strongly with hpaPaaS adoption.
Bimodal IT requires experimentation at minimum cost, aligning strongly with the self-service cloud characteristics of PaaS. Using hpaPaaS to quickly define UIs and associated data resources to new front-end AI and ML initiatives, makes more sense than spending time and resources on developing such supporting software infrastructure in a conventional high-control fashion. The ready availability of third-party REST API services from cloud service providers and specialists invites enterprises to experiment; hpaPaaS provides the ideal front-end for doing so.
■ Digital business and IoT demands are driving hpaPaaS evolution.
Stream processing, event processing, real-time analytics, web-scale, in-memory computing, real-time context-aware decision support and other innovations are at the center of digital business development innovations. While many of these are the domain of high-control aPaaS and equivalent platforms today, we are seeing hpaPaaS vendors investing in the architecture and technologies necessary to support these technologies and to deliver on digital business requirements.
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■ Democratization of IT through cloud services.
Like any cloud service, hpaPaaS is offered with subscription pricing that makes it attractive to both SMBs and enterprise IT organizations. This enables smaller businesses to gain the same benefits — of advanced services and scalability — as larger enterprises, together with greater productivity, agility, efficiency and access to continuous innovation.
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Acronym Key and Glossary Terms 3GL third-generation language
AI artificial intelligence
aPaaS application PaaS
AWS Amazon Web Services
B2E business-to-employee
BPM business process management
BPMN Business Process Model and Notation (standard)
CRUD create, read, update, delete
DMN Decision Model and Notation (standard)
HIPAA Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (U.S.)
hpaPaaS high-productivity application PaaS
IaaS infrastructure as a service
IDE integrated development environment
IoT Internet of Things
iPaaS integration PaaS
iSaaS integration SaaS
ISV independent software vendor
LOB line of business
MADP mobile app development platform
PaaS platform as a service
PaaS+ PaaS with included applications
RAD rapid application development
RMAD rapid mobile app development
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SMB small or midsize business
SOA service-oriented architecture
VM virtual machine
xPaaS generic PaaS
Gartner Recommended Reading Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
"Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2016"
"Predicts 2018: PaaS Innovation Accelerates as Major Vendors Gain Market Share"
"Seven Key Criteria for Selecting Application Platform as a Service"
"Choosing an aPaaS: High Productivity, High Control or Both?"
"Market Guide for Application Platforms"
"Market Guide for High-Productivity Rapid Application Development Tools"
"Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites"
"How Markets and Vendors Are Evaluated in Gartner Magic Quadrants"
Evaluation Criteria Definitions
Ability to Execute Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
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Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements.
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Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.
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