Accelerating App Delivery

How aPaaS Enables Fast Delivery & Continuous Innovation

Issue 1 2 Welcome 2 Resources 3 From the Gartner : Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform , Worldwide 32 About

Featuring research from 2

Welcome

Innovate or perish. That’s the reality facing every business, regardless of industry. The need to deliver modern, multi-channel applications that engage customers and empower employees has never been more urgent. Yet, fast-growing project backlogs and unhappy business sponsors are clear indications that traditional development approaches aren’t cutting it.

Enterprise application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) offers a much-needed way forward, promising to accelerate your application delivery cadence and capacity. But the market is crowded, and not all aPaaS offerings are created equal.

In Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as Service (aPaaS), Mendix was positioned as a “Visionary” due to its completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Use this complimentary Gartner report to better understand and navigate the aPaaS landscape and ultimately select the platform best suited to your organization’s priorities.

Resources

In addition to Gartner’s perspective, we have [Video] aPaaS Success Stories included four resources to illustrate how Mendix See how Mendix customers, such as Dun & supports customers through their digital journeys, Bradstreet, LV= Insurance, The Boston Globe empowering them to deliver the right apps with and Kao, are rapidly delivering custom apps that unprecedented speed. differentiate their business. Watch video → Successful App Delivery for the Digital Age Find out how to keep your IT team on track and [Video] The Mendix App Platform Tour quickly deliver the multi-channel, multi-device Take a two-minute tour of the Mendix App apps needed to digitize your business. Platform to see how companies all over the world Get eBook → create enterprise web and mobile applications faster and better than ever. The ultimate guide to aPaaS Watch video → Ready to move forward? Find out how aPaaS fits into the PaaS landscape, why it’s a must-have Source: Mendix for enterprises, and key questions to ask as you evaluate vendors. Get eBook → 3

From the Gartner Files: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application , Worldwide

Application platform technology Magic Quadrant innovation has moved to the , as CIOs, IT planners and architects, driven by the demands of cloud, mobile and FIGURE 1 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Worldwide IoT, seek innovation in technology and business. We examine the most prominent vendor offerings designed to support and advance these initiatives.

Market Definition/Description Application infrastructure functionality, enriched with cloud characteristics and offered as a service, is platform as a service (PaaS). Gartner refers to it more precisely as cloud application infrastructure services. Application platform as a service (aPaaS) is a form of PaaS that provides a platform to support application development, deployment and execution in the cloud. It is a suite of cloud services designed to meet the prevailing application design requirements of the time, and, in 2015, includes mobile, cloud, the of Things (IoT) and big data analytics innovations.

An aPaaS that is designed to support the enterprise style of applications and application projects (high availability, disaster recovery, security and technical support) is an enterprise aPaaS.

This market includes only companies that Source: Gartner (March 2015) provide public aPaaS offerings (vendors providing aPaaS-enabling software alone are not considered).

See “Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2014” or “Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service (PaaS), 2014” for an expanded form of the definition of aPaaS and other forms of cloud application infrastructure services (xPaaS). 4

Vendor Strengths and Cautions • The vendor’s white-label aPaaS program offering for telecommunications companies and cloudControl IaaS providers provides a potentially powerful mechanism for expanding geographical cloudControl is a European vendor that provides coverage by acting as a force multiplier for a high-control, multilanguage, shared-OS aPaaS cloudControl sales and marketing. deployed on (AWS) data centers. In August 2014, cloudControl added to its Cautions geographic coverage and doubled its customers when it bought the dotCloud North American • cloudControl’s use of the dotCloud brand in aPaaS business from Docker. The underlying North America and its use of a white-label technology of the dotCloud aPaaS is being shifted program for expansion into other geographies to the technology used by the cloudControl aPaaS limit the vendor’s ability to grow worldwide instances (applications built for dotCloud have recognition of the cloudControl brand. As a to be migrated by May 2015), but the U.S.-based smaller competitor in the aPaaS market, this aPaaS will continue to operate under the dotCloud could create a challenge to cloudControl’s name, running on Compute Engine and long-term market positioning. offering an alternative infrastructure to the AWS- based cloudControl branded PaaS. The vendor • Its use of so many add-on partners for advanced also offers a white-label aPaaS program, mostly to capabilities increases cloudControl’s external telecommunications companies and infrastructure dependencies, and revenue sharing with these as a service (IaaS) providers, where cloudControl partners reduces cloudControl’s net revenue. provides its aPaaS as a managed layer on top of the partner’s IaaS offering. Exoscale, in • Slow growth of an ecosystem of SaaS Switzerland, is an example of a white-label partner. providers that have built their applications on cloudControl’s platform may be a handicap All of the U.S., European and white-label inasmuch as the extension and customization implementations provide the same developer of SaaS applications are major drivers of and runtime services with the same APIs, the aPaaS adoption in mainstream enterprise IT same levels of support, and the same pricing organizations. arrangements. In addition to its buildpack-based deployment model, cloudControl offers an add-on • Without high-productivity development marketplace where users can leverage more than services for application development and 40 third-party services in areas such as continuous integration, business process management integration and deployment, log management, (BPM), and event processing, cloudControl email, search, security, data management, revenue opportunities will be limited to a analytics, and message queuing. subset of the market for enterprise PaaS services. Strengths • The vendor has over 1,400 registered customer accounts with more than 800 active deployments Engine Yard is a cloud-based, shared-hardware, across its dotCloud and cloudControl branded high-control aPaaS that uses a dedicated services. Overall revenue from aPaaS services has environment for each tenant. The platform been growing through the dotCloud acquisition, supports a limited set of languages and the white-label program and organic growth. frameworks: Originally focused just on Ruby on Rails, Engine Yard now also supports Java, Node. • Support of the buildpack specification enables js and PHP. Each supported environment is a cloudControl, its partners and its customers to managed and curated infrastructure stack with a extend the platform with new language engines, configurable composition. frameworks, databases and other software services available from other vendors that Founded in 2006, Engine Yard was a pioneer in the support buildpacks. The vendor provides and PaaS market. The platform caters to professional supports many buildpacks, but developers can developers looking for a low-level platform that create their own to expand the technologies that hides and automates system administration of an they can use. underlying IaaS. (The platform runs on, and Engine Yard resells, AWS, Azure and Verizon Terremark.) 5

For an aPaaS, Engine Yard provides exceptionally environments that benefit most from manual deep control of the underlying environment. In and preplanned approaches to changing fact, the vendor now refers to the platform as a capacity. cloud application management platform, rather than aPaaS, indicating a shift in focus from aPaaS • Engine Yard is primarily focused on alleviating to utilitarian service provider. Applications run subscribers’ responsibilities for managing directly on the host infrastructure, and subscribers system infrastructure, but not to the point of have full root access to the virtual servers. For relinquishing control of those system resources. example, subscribers can define custom Chef Although the abstraction level provided does recipes to configure the servers. The platform qualify as PaaS, much of the design and many supports manual and scheduled scaling, but no of the use cases for Engine Yard are close to dynamic autoscaling. what Gartner calls “IaaS+.”

Strengths • The vendor does not provide its own integration, BPM, big data and analytics • Engine Yard has over 1,500 Web 2.0 and capabilities, nor does it offer a model-driven, digital business clients. It provides a solid high-productivity cloud platform environment. foundation for DevOps and continuous delivery. Those looking for an application platform It remains the leading aPaaS for Ruby on Rails for LOB levels of productivity or advanced deployments. enterprise projects should look elsewhere.

• Customers cite Engine Yard’s responsiveness, Google support and reliability as key strengths. Google’s aPaaS offering is available in the form of (a shared-OS, high- • The vendor’s tenant environments have control application platform) and managed been shown to scale well, and its underlying virtual machines (VMs) – a somewhat extended infrastructure can be extensively customized, technology of App Engine offered in the less which allows for advanced technical control for restrictive, but also less elastic, shared-hardware customers that want it. format. Google’s aPaaS offering supports Java, Python, Go and PHP programming. It is offered • Engine Yard’s transparent pricing model clearly colocated with multiple related services, including shows costs for the Engine Yard platform and future Google versus the underlying IaaS, and this model Container Engine (both IaaS), as well as some is more cost-effective for larger customers xPaaS offerings, such as SQL and NoSQL database than the previous model. Customers can now management systems (DBMSs), analytics and also deploy Engine Yard on their own IaaS mobile back-end services. environments. Strengths Cautions • Google’s large installed base (it claims over • From a business perspective, Engine Yard 20,000 paying customers) consists of many stumbled in 2013 when it attempted to expand small Web innovators, some very large Web its market to line of business (LOB) clients business sites (such as Snapchat and Khan in traditional corporate accounts. 2014 was Academy) and a small, but growing number a year of change, and the board brought in of mainstream enterprise IT organizations. a new executive team and restructured the Additionally, Google claims that over 90% of its company. The vendor is now refocused on internal IT is run on App Engine. This diversity its core strength: the developer and DevOps in scale and use patterns creates a strong community. As a result, growth opportunities foundation for support of demanding enterprise are limited. workloads that also differ in use patterns and demand for quality of service across industries. • Engine Yard has limited cloud capabilities, particularly in elasticity and sharing. Its • Google’s well-established reputation as a cloud- shared-hardware model and lack of dynamic native service provider and an early platform autoscaling mean that it is best-suited for and big data innovator lends credibility to App 6

Engine and other xPaaS offerings for projects central IT application projects, will find that that seek cloud-native efficiency, scalability App Engine does not match well with their and agility. Google’s aPaaS offering operates productivity requirements and skill sets, on the same worldwide network of data centers keeping Google out of the fast-growing Mode 2 as all other Google services, such as market in bimodal enterprise IT. Search and Google Apps for Work, reassuring its strategic priority to the company. • A strategic focus on public cloud-only services and the absence of on-premises versions of • Some of Google’s recently added enterprise Google software exclude the vendor from capabilities (including 99.95% availability consideration by some more conservative SLAs; multiple models for disaster recovery; mainstream enterprises looking for a hybrid enterprise-level support, a relational PaaS environment as a kind of risk control DBMS in addition to high-scale NoSQL; approach. The few third-party attempts nonintrusive version control; no planned at porting App Engine to on-premises (for downtime experience for customers; dynamic example, Red Hat CapeDwarf and AppScale) multimeasure bidirectional autoscaling; lack assured viability and have not gathered application life cycle management; API a substantial following, despite Google’s management; rich security support; cost cooperation and endorsement. optimization for workloads of different urgency; event processing; and conversational mode via • Google’s portfolio of xPaaS capabilities misses channels) mitigate the long-standing obstacles some important services typically used by to enterprise adoption of Google’s aPaaS. enterprise customers in conjunction with aPaaS. These especially include application • API-level integration with Google Apps enables and data integration, advanced in-memory the vendor to offer its PaaS capabilities as an computing, BPM, and legacy migration services. upsell to enterprises adopting Google Apps This delayed recognition of larger enterprise and looking for new ways to extend them requirements puts Google at a competitive using advanced programming. The combined disadvantage in the mainstream enterprise selling of Google Apps (SaaS) and Google computing market. Cloud Platform (IaaS and PaaS) is a promising business opportunity. IBM IBM’s aPaaS offering is part of its suite of Cautions PaaS capabilities (xPaaS), developed and supported by IBM, its partners or the open community. These • Google’s historically limited reputation as an include database, integration, mobile, DevOps, enterprise service provider, in general, and its security, monitoring and other services. IBM small presence as an enterprise PaaS provider, Bluemix is deployed on the network of SoftLayer in particular, have created a perception that data centers worldwide. IBM Bluemix is based in it is a consumer-only vendor. To succeed part on the open-source OpenStack and Cloud as an enterprise platform provider, Google Foundry v.2 software. must develop an aggressive and convincing marketing campaign to overcome this The Bluemix Liberty for Java offering implements perception. Beyond marketing, Google will IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty Core have to continue to aggressively develop sales as a buildpack. Managed by the and account management practices to match Cloud Foundry PaaS framework using its Warden the traditional expectations of mainstream OS container, it is a shared-OS, high-control, enterprise IT (e.g., continuity, presence and cloud-based application platform service. IBM also trust). provides the SDK for Node.js aPaaS environment. Other language environments and frameworks • The lack of a model-driven, high-productivity available on Bluemix include the community- aPaaS option in the Google Cloud Platform provided PHP, Go, Ruby and Python. Users are portfolio limits the addressable market for invited to add their own language environments Google’s aPaaS offering to highly skilled utilizing the open-source buildpack support in IBM developers. Most enterprise LOB IT and citizen Bluemix. developers, and some productivity-oriented 7

Other IBM Bluemix capabilities (including the megavendor competitors (although most users multiple available DBMS services that are should not assume substantial freedom from essential to aPaaS operation) are delivered as lock-in). Cloud Foundry services. By Cloud Foundry design, the cloud characteristics of buildpacks, such as Cautions elasticity and scaling, do not automatically extend to Cloud Foundry services. IBM implements some • IBM Bluemix is the second attempt by the of the Bluemix services with embedded cloud vendor to enter the aPaaS and PaaS market. management, but a consistent cloud enablement The previous offering, SmartCloud Application of Bluemix services is not yet available. Services (SCAS), has been replaced by Bluemix and discontinued, with customers facing a The recent Bluemix Dedicated option supports significant challenge of discontinuity. In that the hosted managed private cloud model. Local context, some prospects may feel that IBM Bluemix (now in beta) will offer on-premises must prove that Bluemix has the company’s managed private Bluemix. Having started as a long-term strategic commitment and that public cloud-only Bluemix service, with these there will be no more major disruptions on the offerings, IBM is now well-positioned to support IBM aPaaS road map. (IBM’s growing broad consistent hybrid PaaS and hybrid IT environments. investment in Bluemix can be seen as part of the answer to this concern.) Strengths • Cloud Foundry software that is at the base of • IBM’s large and loyal installed base, ample IBM Bluemix remains relatively immature. partner network, and the popularity and The next version, Cloud Foundry v.3, is under credibility of its on-premises application development now in the CFF community infrastructure offerings – coupled with its and, given its scale of change, is likely to strong professional services and outsourcing introduce some discontinuities. IBM’s own businesses – provide the vendor with plenty Cloud Foundry extensions, including the future of opportunities and channels to cross-sell support of the microservice architecture and a its aPaaS offerings. Adding to this advantage, consistent cloud enablement of IBM’s diverse the partial backward compatibility of Liberty Bluemix services, are separate from the CFF for Java with the on-premises WebSphere development, adding to the potential for some Application Server provides a migration path for future disruptions for Bluemix customers. software and development skills for most IBM customers. • The lack of a model-driven, high-productivity aPaaS option in the Bluemix portfolio will • Wide name recognition achieved by IBM for likely lead LOB IT, citizen developers and its Bluemix strategy indicates an effective some central IT projects to look elsewhere for marketing effort and forms a good foundation suitable cloud application platform services, for growth. keeping IBM out of a fast-growing, productivity- centric Mode 2 market segment in bimodal • The large catalog of capabilities available enterprise IT. Some Bluemix services, such as through the Bluemix marketplace, as well DataWorks, use a model-driven design, but as the ecosystem of partners that is forming there is no strategic, shared, high-productivity around the IBM cloud platform, create an aPaaS platform in the IBM portfolio. opportunity for aPaaS and PaaS market leadership that IBM can solidify by building up • The large installed base of on-premises the reputation and scale of its offerings. systems, while providing a potential for a solid base for growth, also forces IBM to • The use of open-source foundation technology adapt its cloud design decisions to meet the in the form of OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, expectations of its established enterprise-bound as well as IBM’s strategic position in multiple customers. Many of those are demanding open-source organizations, including the continuity of software, practices and skills, and recently established Cloud Foundry Foundation the ability to migrate legacy systems to a cloud (CFF), help IBM present its cloud vision as foundation. This limits IBM’s ability to invest in open, with less vendor lock-in than many of its new cloud-native platform architectures. 8

Indra gnubila • In the past 12 months, Indra gnubila focused Indra gnubila is the software and cloud service on further strengthening already notable cloud business unit of Indra, a large Spanish system and enterprise-oriented capabilities (shared- integrator operating in about 140 countries. The everything, autoscaling, high-availability, business unit was set up after the acquisition of disaster recovery, monitoring, security and gnubila, a small Spanish software company. The SLA arrangements) by adding: vertical scaling, vendor’s G application platform is available as self-auditing, an integration/API management on-premises, cloud-enabled application platform platform and DevOps capabilities. The platform (CEAP) software (via both an open-source license was also expanded to address additional use and as a supported product), and in the form of cases, such as IoT (via MQTT and Web sockets a high-control, cloud-native, shared-everything support) and big data (via integration with aPaaS. Apache Hadoop and Azure ). In this way, the vendor further increased the G platform’s The G platform supports Java EE, .NET, Ruby, appeal with organizations looking for an aPaaS PHP, Python and Perl application containers, and to support a variety of highly business-critical provides additional capabilities atop the core projects in pure cloud or hybrid deployment application server platform, including mobile app scenarios. support; a graph-oriented, in-memory multitenant DBMS (Gdb); big data capabilities; a model-driven • Availability of the platform on multiple data rapid development platform; workflow; document centers and IaaS platforms, in addition to management; support for mobile devices; and compatibility with the on-premises version, reporting and data integration features. The allows maximum deployment flexibility for recently integrated Sofia2 technology adds API user organizations and opens partnership gateway/API management capabilities to the core opportunities for the vendor. application platform technology. • Clients cite reliability, stable performance even The aPaaS rendition of the G platform is available during workload peaks, a fast and seamless on top of AWS, Google Compute, Azure upgrade process, low cost, and effective and and Indra’s Flex-IT IaaS platforms. timely support as notable characteristics of the platform. The G platform is primarily used to support Indra’s business units wishing to move established Cautions packaged applications to a cloud (private or public) architecture or to develop cloud-native • Indra gnubila’s installed base grew modestly in applications, but is also proposed as a stand-alone 2014, thus making evident that the potential offering. commercial synergies with Indra’s business units and geographic presence have not yet Strengths turned into an effective sales strategy able to generate the fast, global growth momentum • Indra gnubila’s aPaaS core strengths are in its needed to survive in the highly competitive advanced and extensive set of features, and aPaaS marketplace. in the wealth of capabilities to support third- party independent software vendors (ISVs) and • The G platform suffers from limited market user organizations willing to move established awareness and a weak sales push, including in on-premises applications to the cloud. These its own home country, neither of which have capabilities include: a variety of programming notably increased over the past 12 months and languages; an SQL in-memory DBMS; for which the vendor doesn’t appear to have compatibility with Java EE and .NET; migration aggressive plans. Therefore, it will be difficult tools; fast application cloning; an ample set for the Indra gnubila aPaaS to get on the radar of DevOps APIs; an application marketplace; a screens of organizations looking for an aPaaS. billing and accounting module; and integration with a variety of payment gateways. The use • Technical support delivered from Colombia of the platform by other Indra business units (where the platform is largely developed) validates the positioning of G as a platform to and Spain, and a tiny professional services help “cloudify” precloud applications. organization may be obstacles for the implementation of international-scale projects. 9

• Even if Indra gnubila boasts relationships with is well-funded and has a track record of strong multiple world-class vendors (such as Microsoft, annual growth. IBM and ), none of these partnerships has generated significant business for the • Mendix App Platform has proven capabilities company, which, in general, lacks a strategy as a high-productivity platform for rapid to partner with ISVs and service providers, development of sophisticated business thus limiting its ability to reach a broader, applications. The addition of support for Cloud international market. Foundry in 2Q15 will make Mendix one of the few aPaaS vendors offering a single solution for Mendix high productivity and high control. Founded in 2005 in the Netherlands, and now with headquarters in Boston, Mendix is a small, but • Mendix supports subtenancy, allowing ISVs well-established, pure-play aPaaS provider. The to use Mendix App Platform as a foundation Mendix App Platform is a shared-OS, multitenant for SaaS. SaaS offerings create a channel for aPaaS comprising a high-productivity development upselling the underlying platform. environment (Mendix Business Modeler), a • Flexible deployment options enable customers collaboration and administration portal (Mendix to deploy applications on-premises, on the Developer Portal), and a runtime server (Mendix Mendix Cloud service, or on a supported public Business Server). The Mendix App Store provides a IaaS or aPaaS of their choice. venue for vendors and users to share applications, widgets and services. Cautions Mendix Business Modeler supports “no-code” • The Mendix aPaaS architecture uses shared- development of multichannel applications OS multitenancy built on containers. using visual, process-oriented, model-driven This approach represents one of the easier development and service composition. Models paths to multitenancy, but it doesn’t offer can be extended using code written in Java, Scala the same level of resource sharing as shared- and JavaScript. The development environment everything multitenancy (which most high- is available as a cloud service, or it may be productivity cloud-native aPaaS offerings use). downloaded to a developer’s computer. In either Consequently, underlying infrastructure costs case, application metadata is stored in a cloud- may be higher than with other providers. resident repository, and applications can be deployed to any Mendix Business Server with a • The Mendix approach to elasticity is not as single click. automatic as some of the other aPaaS offerings, meaning that operators must attend to usage Mendix Business Server is offered as a hosted metrics on an ongoing basis for applications public aPaaS (Mendix AppCloud), and it can be that may encounter spikes in use. (The next deployed on-premises or on a third-party IaaS. version will support autoscaling.) Mendix Business Server is also available as a Cloud Foundry buildpack, which means that it can be • While Mendix has an established aPaaS deployed on any Cloud Foundry-based PaaS and business, it will face increasing challenges on . Mendix Cloud currently doesn’t run on as larger vendors (such as IBM, Microsoft, Cloud Foundry, although Mendix expects to release Progress, Red Hat, SAP and Software AG) a new Cloud Foundry-based version of Mendix ratchet up their aPaaS efforts. Cloud by June 2015. The CFF will add high-control and autoscaling features to the Mendix aPaaS. • Given that Mendix App Platform can be easily The new version will support the Cloud Foundry deployed in other environments, Mendix is a system buildpacks (Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python likely acquisition target for high-control players and Ruby), as well as third-party Cloud Foundry looking to obtain a high-productivity system. buildpacks and Cloud Foundry services. Microsoft Strengths Microsoft aPaaS is offered in two forms: Microsoft • Mendix has a worldwide presence with more Azure App Service (launched on 24 March 2015) than 500 loyal paying customers and thousands combines the high-control shared-OS Azure of nonpaying users. The privately held company Web Sites aPaaS with the public preview of 10

capabilities based on Azure Mobile Services, premises variant of some Azure capabilities, Azure Biz Talk Services and components of Azure helps attract aPaaS customers, including ISVs, API Management; and separately high-control often sensitive to lock-in issues. Cloud Services, including Azure Web and Worker Roles (uses less-flexible shared- • Revamped company leadership and new hardware elasticity). Azure Web Sites is also strategic investments that demonstrate available as software for private cloud as part innovative vision across multiple Microsoft of the Windows Azure Pack. The full Azure App business lines, as well as its fast-growing Service is intended to be offered as software at worldwide presence as a cloud service provider, some future date. Microsoft aPaaS is part of a lift many customers’ expectations of Microsoft’s larger Azure cloud platform, where other PaaS future, and help accelerate momentum in capabilities, including DBMS, analytics, batch adoption of Microsoft aPaaS capabilities, which and identity management, and other services, struggled in the market in prior years. are combined with IaaS capabilities, including compute and storage services. This cloud Cautions integrated infrastructure service (CIIS) platform enables on-cloud integration of older and new • The Microsoft Azure environment lacks a application software and databases. Microsoft high-productivity, model-driven application Azure is available in Microsoft or partner-owned design and development capability data centers in all major geographic regions. (Visual Studio productivity tools and some support of workflow in Azure App Service Strengths notwithstanding). Having a high-control programming environment alone, without a • Windows developers familiar with .NET competitive high-productivity option, limits languages and frameworks find Azure a the market for the vendor’s aPaaS offerings natural environment from which to move to to advanced projects in enterprise central IT cloud application development. This presents and independent developers. Reaching aPaaS the opportunity to bring millions of .NET market leadership will also require addressing developers, as well as the thousands of .NET the simpler application projects in central IT, as ISVs, to Azure, and to establish a significant well as the requirements of LOB IT and citizen ecosystem of cloud application services (SaaS) developers, all of which demand productivity and partners. A SaaS ecosystem in turn elevates tools. (Gartner expects that Microsoft will begin its underlying PaaS, including aPaaS. to address this shortcoming during the next 12 months and beyond, but the degree of success • Microsoft distinctively combines its proven of future innovation is uncertain.) reputation as an enterprise IT provider and the growing acceptance of the vendor as • Microsoft’s ambitious vision of a comprehensive a competent cloud service provider. This IaaS/PaaS offering and its determination to coveted dual strength puts Microsoft ahead adopt the latest market innovations demand of most competitors, which typically lack the a massive and highly agile development strength and reputation in either cloud or effort. The vendor is progressing in the right enterprise computing. Gartner believes that direction; however, in the meantime, this future platform market leadership will demand positions the current aPaaS environment as competence in both enterprise and cloud “under construction,” pending the arrival of computing quality of service. a revamped, comprehensive underlying PaaS framework and many of the promised relevant • Recently implemented support of non- capabilities, such as integration and BPM. Microsoft technologies (such as Linux-based compute, Java application development and • Microsoft investment in cloud application Docker container management), combined services (Dynamics, Office 365) remains with the increasing support of open-source separately standing from its Azure services. This software (including the offering of a .NET minimizes for Microsoft the best accelerator framework under an open-source license), to adoption of PaaS: the SaaS customer base help communicate to the market the vendor’s looking to extend, customize and integrate commitment to reduce lock-in for its customer its SaaS capabilities. The business application base. This, as well as support for the on- services are also challenged to compete 11

without a natively integrated PaaS. In a • Support of integrated public, managed private competitive market, Microsoft will need all the and virtual private delivery of the platform essential tools in its portfolio to succeed, and enables IT organizations to build hybrid and SaaS/PaaS synergy is one of them. distributed applications. Customers choose locations for the data, the degree of its • Limited support for vertical-industry-specific distribution, and the degree of control over requirements leaves the vendor open to different segments of their business data and challenges from some, possibly smaller, more data processing. focused platform competitors. • A customer base and company presence that MIOsoft is distributed across the U.S., Europe and Asia MIOsoft is a Madison, Wisconsin, company, with form a promising foundation for future growth. offices also in Germany and China. It was founded The use of colocation data centers in multiple in 1998. MIOsoft MIOedge is an advanced, geographical locations, and support of Amazon data-centric, cloud-native aPaaS using a shared- and other IaaS platforms, adds to the available OS model for cloud elasticity. It offers high- deployment options. productivity application development options with some high-control opportunities. MIOedge Cautions is available from data centers in the U.S., Europe and Asia. MIOedge’s capability can be delivered as • A focus on advanced NoSQL/Hadoop analytical public, virtual private, managed private and private data models makes the platform less suitable cloud service or software. It includes some data for simple transactional applications using a integration and business analytics capabilities, in basic relational data model, and not suitable for addition to core data-centric application and object migrating existing enterprise applications to the database platform services, including in-memory cloud. data processing. MIOedge is focused on big data- • Minimal name recognition reflects the analytics-oriented and context-aware application limited ability of the vendor to market and design, and is less suitable for common Web or reach its addressable market. It also keeps other enterprise applications. MIOsoft off many longlists and denies it Strengths many opportunities to compete. Most paying customers use MIOsoft technology either on- • Strategic investment in big data management premises or hosted off-premises (virtual private (offering variety through support of multiple deployment), further reducing its exposure as a data formats, models and sources; velocity full-functionality cloud aPaaS provider. through support of IoT endpoints and other event streams; and volume through the ability • The proprietary encoding of business logic to absorb petabytes of incoming data), data (graphics and proprietary scripting language) integration and business analytics, including translates to a vendor lock-in and can prevent support for parallel processing and in-memory adoption by some mainstream IT organizations. computing, differentiates MIOsoft from most Recently, MIOsoft added support of Java and aPaaS competitors. Its vision for a hybrid JavaScript programming surrounding the core transaction/analytics platform (HTAP) and MIOsoft data store, as an alternative to the context-aware enterprise computing is market- native proprietary MIOscript and to mitigate leading in its category. this challenge.

• High-productivity, model-driven development • The business model focus on advanced tools feature the graphical design of big-data- analytical application scenarios, while oriented applications and analytics, producing supporting advanced software projects, high-performance, parallelized and in-memory limits MIOsoft’s target market to leading- HTAP applications with Web or mobile UIs. edge IT organizations, mostly missing the Application designers need not be experts in large potential opportunity of aPaaS support advanced architecture to for simple, mainstream enterprise and LOB create advanced cloud computing applications. applications. 12

NTT Communications • Customers report the high quality of NTT NTT Communications is a large, well-recognized, Communications’ professional services proven global sourcing carrier service provider and resources in addressing customers’ needs in a cloud service provider, with headquarters in Tokyo responsive manner. and many regional offices globally. Cautions NTT Communications’ Cloudn PaaS is a high- control aPaaS on top of its public IaaS offering, • The vendor’s responsiveness to the aPaaS- introduced in April 2013. The service leverages enabling technology evolution is slower than Pivotal Cloud Foundry as an enabling technology, its competitors (for example, it only recently to which NTT Communications added “cloudiness” upgraded to Cloud Foundry v.2.0 as its enabling characteristics. platform, and does not support alternative container technologies, such as Docker). The vendor has succeeded in earning a good presence in the IaaS business among demanding • NTT Communications’ Cloudn PaaS’s focus large enterprises. Its PaaS business is a strategic is primarily on hosting or migrating on- piece in expanding its strength across the larger premises applications to the cloud, not on new cloud service stack (both in public and private application development, and it lacks high- deployments) and its business ecosystem, on top productivity development tools. of its telecommunications service capability. • The vendor’s PaaS adoption growth is slow due Strengths to increasing severe competition from cloud service providers in SaaS/PaaS/IaaS, and from • The vendor’s Cloudn PaaS has approximately conventional application platform vendors. Its 500 customers and supports multiple installed base is still limited to inside Japan, application server containers (Tomcat 6 and with almost no presence abroad. Resin) and multiple languages (including Java, Node.js, Ruby and multiple frameworks such • The road map of Cloudn PaaS, from a business as Spring and Play), and it provides a Cloud and technology perspective, is not clear, Foundry plug-in for development. Its nor has notable evolutional progress been open-source-software-based openness provides proposed. application portability, minimizes vendor OrangeScape lock-in and strongly promotes the open PaaS movement by itself. OrangeScape is a Chennai, India-based company (operating also from Mountain View, California). It • Cloudn PaaS offers a broad set of high-control was founded in 2003 as a vendor of on-premises, services, including AWS-compatible APIs (for high-productivity development software. A high- example, autoscaling, monitoring, provisioning productivity aPaaS offering, built over Google’s and multiple kinds of compute services). high-control App Engine aPaaS, was offered in Cloudn PaaS supports multiple deployment 2008. OrangeScape also offers KiSSFLOW, a scenarios (i.e., on-premises, hosted private, bpmPaaS available since 2012. Zapier is supported virtual private, public and hybrid cloud). By for citizen integration tasks. OrangeScape’s connecting Cloudn PaaS to Enterprise Cloud, its technology, sales and marketing focus has been own private cloud (IaaS), via a VPN through an shifting toward bpmPaaS capabilities since the open network/closed network, a virtual private introduction of KiSSFLOW. cloud is configured. Cloudn PaaS runs in NTT Communications’ own data centers both in Strengths Japan and the U.S., with high availability (i.e., an SLA of 99.99%) and options to choose where • OrangeScape offers broad functionality that customers’ applications will run. supports development of simple solutions as well as complex applications incorporating • NTT Communications plans to revamp its business rules, workflow, complex data models, enabling application platform, starting with reporting and composite services that involve an upgrade to Pivotal Cloud Foundry v.2.0 or a integration of third-party programs and data. newer-version-based technology set, as well as adding multiple IaaS orchestration features. 13

• While positioned as an environment that the application. Applications are developed using can be used by a nontechnical developer, native desktop tools and deployed to the on- the OrangeScape aPaaS has many advanced premises, private cloud or public cloud, and are features that allow it to support multiple usable with Web and mobile devices. application development and integration styles. For example, each table defined in Strengths the OrangeScape environment automatically generates a Web services interface with five • The platform makes extensive use of metadata operations. Then, OrangeScape-generated Ajax models to configure the application layers – UIs call the Web services generated for these business processes, integration workflows, UIs, tables, as well as Web services generated from business logic, data model, Web services and rule sets or workflows generated from other APIs – enabling high-productivity development components of the OrangeScape platform. and faster time to solution. Developers can incorporate their own custom Java or # code • OrangeScape’s ability to generate REST Web or libraries, and compose them as part of the services interfaces for internal components model. means that its application development environment can be extended by using third- • Applications built using OutSystems are party UI tools such as Adobe Flash or Flex, very portable. Applications can be exported Microsoft Silverlight, or a mobile application to an Eclipse or Visual Studio project, and development platform. can be deployed and maintained outside the OutSystems aPaaS. Also, the platform Cautions allows developers to take a hybrid approach to application development and hosting, thus • Despite being active in the aPaaS market since avoiding lock-in to any one platform. 2009, OrangeScape has yet to generate global brand awareness, something that is essential to • Through OutSystems Forge, anyone (including broad aPaaS sales and marketing. The vendor’s partners, enterprise and individual developers, focus on BPM use cases and the KiSSFLOW and OutSystems) can provide – and developers brand further limits its positioning in the have access to – a number of a prebuilt general-purpose aPaaS market. components and sample applications that offer different platform capabilities, such as Google • Although OrangeScape has deployed resources Maps, email and PayPal services integration, outside of India, most of its aPaaS sales and prebuilt UI components, like file upload successes are local. and calendars. OutSystems also provides a number of sample applications and industry • Without support for high-control aPaaS frameworks that demonstrate how different services, OrangeScape’s growth will be limited components can quickly be brought together to to those developers who best fit its relatively build an application. narrow target developer profile. • OutSystems’ platform provides a number • OrangeScape has had limited success in of APIs, such as those allowing detailed recruiting ISVs to build their applications on the monitoring of application and environment OrangeScape platform. Because a considerable performance metrics. Further, it also enables part of current aPaaS use is derived from the management of user accounts and access building extensions to SaaS offerings, this will roles. The platform also provides a number limit the vendor’s opportunities for growth. of other APIs, including: Business Process Technology (BPT) for processes and activities, OutSystems Charts, TaskBox for custom activity inbox OutSystems is a high-productivity enterprise rapid management, and REST to consume external application delivery (RAD) PaaS that focuses on APIs. accelerating the time to solution of enterprise apps. OutSystems’ platform uses an indirectly Cautions executed metadata-driven model – that is, the metadata model is used to generate .NET or Java • Because OutSystems’ platform uses a code, which ultimately drives the execution of metadata model to describe the behavior of 14

an application, it does not give the developer mobile back-end services, and DataDirect Cloud, complete control over the generated code. which provides data connectivity, virtualization While generated code can be detached from and integration cloud services. Although Progress the platform, generated code modified outside has not yet deeply integrated the products, they the platform cannot be easily reintegrated back all work well together, and they interoperate with into the original solution without rework (no on-premises OpenEdge applications and databases. automated round-trip development). All Progress Pacific offerings support development with JavaScript. Both Rollbase and Modulus are • OutSystems Forge currently provides no way for also available as a CEAP, and can be deployed on- partners to monetize their Forge components; premises and in any public IaaS environment. there is little incentive for developers to contribute to Forge. Further, guaranteed Strengths technical support is only provided for a handful of the available Forge components; most • Progress Pacific is a comprehensive aPaaS components are published by third parties and offering. A combination of high-productivity support is provided by the component creator and high-control environments caters to all through a discussion forum. users. User-experience-focused tooling, mobile services and data virtualization capabilities • While OutSystems’ model-driven approach to facilitate compelling multichannel business development accelerates the time to solution, applications. Flexible hosting options allow developers experienced in more traditional customers to deploy applications in public, approaches to application development may hosted private and on-premises configurations. struggle to understand how to balance the use of custom code and libraries, versus using the • Progress has a well-established on-premises model. platform business with its high-productivity OpenEdge platform and database. The • Production enterprise applications do not scale vendor is aggressively selling Pacific to this automatically with the usage of the application. existing customer base, and provides tools While resources can be added in a relatively that make migration to Rollbase simple and easy way, the decision to allocate more straightforward. resources to run an application is a manual one. • Progress has a strong ISV program. More Progress than 1,400 ISVs provide applications built on Through a series of acquisitions and homegrown Progress technology, and Progress is recruiting development, Progress has put together a these partners to build solutions on Rollbase comprehensive, multifunctional set of PaaS (more than 40 have done so already). ISVs offerings collectively known as Progress Pacific. can white-label the Rollbase platform, and The family includes two aPaaS offerings: Rollbase ISV partners speak well of Progress’ technical and Modulus. and marketing support. A strong ISV program generates growth opportunities because SaaS Rollbase (acquired in June 2013) is a high- offerings create a channel for upselling the productivity, cloud-native, shared-everything aPaaS underlying platform. that natively supports subtenancy. The runtime engine for Rollbase is the Pacific Application • Progress has launched a program to win clients Server (based on Tomcat), which can also and ISVs from , touting lower costs support native Java applications and applications and increased flexibility. Rollbase includes a developed with Progress’ on-premises platform, tool that can import Salesforce and Force.com OpenEdge. Modulus (acquired in June 2014) is applications. The three-step process imports a mature, high-control aPaaS for running Node. all metadata and data, and instantly generates js, MongoDB and the Meteor.js framework. The a comparable Rollbase application. (The tool Pacific family also includes the Telerik Platform cannot convert Apex and SOQL code, however.) (acquired in October 2014), which adds cloud- hosted, user-experience-focused mobile and • Progress’ plans for Modulus include support desktop development tools, as well as a set of for Docker, additional languages, one-click deployments and subtenancy. 15

Cautions supporting application infrastructure stack. Red Hat offers a number of preconfigured cartridges • Although it has had long-standing success with featuring curated JBoss software stacks, such selling to ISVs and their midmarket customers, as Enterprise Application Platform, Fuse, BPM, Progress has had less success selling to large business rule management system (BRMS) and end-user enterprises, which limits its potential the LiveOak mobile back-end platform. Additional market. cartridges are available for Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Users can also define their own • Progress has a solid reputation as an on- cartridges to support any language, framework, premises platform vendor in the small or high-productivity tool or add-on service. Users and midsize business (SMB) market. It now needs to third-party vendors can share or sell cartridges via establish its brand as a major cloud player. And Red Hat’s OpenShift Marketplace, which thus far it must do more than just leverage its installed has garnered modest participation. base; to be successful in this highly competitive market, Progress must win net new customers. Cartridges are deployed into Linux containers (called ), which allocate system resources • The different offerings work well together, to tenants and ensure tenant isolation. OpenShift but Progress still has work to do to provide a Online supports three standard Gear sizes (small, well-integrated suite. This considerable R&D medium and large). OpenShift Online Dedicated effort may, at least temporarily, lower the Node Services allows organizations to create vendor’s investment in other areas, such as new custom Gear sizes. Applications with volatile features, sales and marketing. scalability requirements typically do better with custom Gears. In the next version of OpenShift, Red • The Progress Pacific development environments Hat will replace its homegrown Gear container API support only Node.js (Modulus) and JavaScript with Docker. Full support for Docker will produce a (Rollbase). (Rollbase can also host applications number of advantages: Users will be able to deploy developed using Java and OpenEdge scripting.) any Docker image into an OpenShift Gear; users Organizations looking to develop using other will have access to the enormous ecosystem of programming languages will have to look Docker images on Docker Hub; and atomic Docker elsewhere. images will deploy faster than cartridge packages.

Red Hat Strengths Red Hat OpenShift Origin is an open-source, high- control, polyglot PaaS framework that provides • OpenShift Online and OpenShift Enterprise use the foundation for Red Hat’s xPaaS family of the same codebase, and offer the flexibility and offerings. Red Hat provides two configurations of choice to deploy in the public cloud and in the its public aPaaS: OpenShift Online is a shared-OS enterprise’s . public aPaaS, and OpenShift Online Dedicated Node Services is an optimized shared-hardware • Red Hat’s financial strength and its expertise public aPaaS, in which each tenant has exclusive in Linux, Java and security make its offerings use of its VMs. Red Hat also provides an on- attractive to enterprises. Although Red Hat had premises CEAP called OpenShift Enterprise, which a late start in the aPaaS market, it now has a IT organizations can use to build a private PaaS solid offering, and it is gaining market share. environment. All variants of OpenShift run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and it can be deployed • The JBoss software stacks are familiar to on AWS, OpenStack, VMware or bare metal. many enterprise developers, and the polyglot OpenShift Origin is available for free download cartridge model (and future Docker integration) without support. can support any middleware environment.

OpenShift supports multiple middleware • Users cite simplicity and ease of use as two environments and languages using a plug-in compelling advantages to the platform. cartridge model that is similar to the Heroku and OpenShift has good support for DevOps and Cloud Foundry buildpack model. (Cartridges and continuous delivery, as well as autoscaling. buildpacks are not interchangeable, however.) Docker support will make it even easier to A cartridge contains application code and its deploy applications. Red Hat will also adopt 16

Google’s for orchestration, which Heroku (via Heroku Connect) and a collection of will provide fine-grained control of automation other platform-related capabilities. Force.com is and autoscaling. built around a proprietary, high-scale, cloud-native relational DBMS. This is the same DBMS that Cautions underlies Salesforce applications.

• Red Hat promotes the OpenShift framework as Heroku is a separately standing, multilingual, a standard, although, to date, Cloud Foundry shared-OS, cloud-based, high-control aPaaS has gained wider vendor support as a PaaS offering. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce in framework standard. This has put Red Hat at a 2010 and continues to run on AWS platform. disadvantage in its efforts to develop a partner Heroku Connect provides a bidirectional data ecosystem, which is illustrated by modest synchronization bridge between the PostgreSQL third-party participation in the OpenShift DBMS managed by Heroku on AWS and the Marketplace. In an effort to spur OpenShift massive (although still remote) Salesforce SaaS adoption, Red Hat recently launched the and PaaS databases. OpenShift Commons Community to foster collaboration and engagement via an open- Other notable components of Salesforce1 Platform source community. Docker support will greatly include AppExchange (an app store listing native expand the OpenShift ecosystem. Force.com and Heroku, plus some connected external applications) and ExactTarget Fuel • The JBoss BPM and BRMS cartridges support (another separately deployed service, dedicated model-driven development, although they to development for Salesforce Marketing Cloud). don’t provide the kind of high-productivity Everything Salesforce offers is available exclusively advantages typical of a high-productivity as a cloud service. There is no deployable software aPaaS. OpenShift can support third-party version of Salesforce1 Platform or any of its high-productivity cartridges, but the DevOps components. experience is designed for the professional developer. It offers few GUI interfaces, and Strengths developers typically interface with the environment using command line interfaces • The vendor is by far the largest provider in (CLIs). the enterprise aPaaS market by revenue and customer base. A cloud pioneer, Salesforce • OpenShift’s built-in analytics and operational has a long-standing strategic successful dashboards are fairly limited. To augment the presence in the cloud application and platform basic capabilities, the customer must use third- markets. This gives it the name recognition and party monitoring cartridges. For example, New reputation that, for many prospects, translate Relic and AppDynamics cartridges are available to a safe choice in the otherwise still immature through the OpenShift Marketplace. and unsettled PaaS market.

• Users note that, although OpenShift supports • Continuing innovation over the years autoscaling, it may take a few minutes to spin produced an offering with a broad portfolio up a new Gear for large applications. The next of capabilities to create applications that release, which includes Docker image-based are mobile, social and highly scalable, with deployment and Kubernetes orchestration, will identity management, and some flow control, improve system resource management and portal and big data capabilities. The platform should alleviate this scalability concern. is open for interoperability via multiple classes of APIs, including REST, SOAP, streaming and Salesforce batch. Most recently, the vendor introduced Salesforce is a cloud computing pioneer offering Salesforce1 Lightning, a new, mobile-first a market-leading SaaS, first introduced in 1999, composite application development platform and a market-leading PaaS unveiled in 2007. to advance the agility, productivity and user- The vendor’s flagship aPaaS offering has been centricity of its application platform. With over and remains Force.com, a cloud-native, high- $4 billion in acquisitions during the last five productivity, shared-everything cloud platform years, including Heroku, Salesforce continues to service. Salesforce1 Platform joins Force.com add more platform capabilities. 17

• Dedicated support for ISVs in Salesforce1 and can be expensive. As other aPaaS vendors Platform and in the vendor’s business model reach more comparable levels of maturity, recognizes the critical importance of the this inflexibility in control of cost and resource ecosystem of partners to the success of provisioning may turn some platform customers a platform offering, and helps Salesforce away. broaden the channels and market presence for its platform. Salesforce enables partners to SAP deploy solutions to customers quickly through The SAP PaaS strategy is framed in the SAP AppExchange. Hana Cloud Platform offering, which includes an aPaaS (SAP Hana Cloud Platform AppServices) • The market-leading success of Salesforce SaaS as well as portal, mobile, integration, analytics offerings creates a massive channel for the and collaboration services, and in-memory DBMS upselling of Salesforce1 Platform; for many capabilities. projects building extensions around Salesforce SaaS, the use of Force.com is a natural choice, SAP Hana Cloud Platform AppServices is a high- enabling the vendor to command premium control/high-productivity, shared-hardware prices and increase users’ usage of its offerings. platform. It includes a Java EE 6 Web Profile-based application server, an HTML5-based development Cautions tool (SAPUI5), a SAP Hana DB-based in-memory DBMS service, a portal service, , • The proprietary nature of the Force.com identity management, and a connectivity service platform deters adoption by many independent to integrate with back-end SAP and non-SAP on- application development projects seeking to premises and cloud-based applications. avoid vendor lock-in, and prevents application migration projects from utilizing the platform. SAP aPaaS is used as the foundation for several SAP SaaS offerings, but it’s also proposed as a • The lack of on-premises options for Force. stand-alone platform for custom developments com applications leaves many enterprise and for extensions to SAP SaaS and on-premises organizations looking for a portable hybrid packaged applications. cloud platform environment outside Salesforce’s addressable market. While Heroku Strengths has been trying to shake its reputation as a lightweight application development platform, • Support for popular open standards (such as it has only recently introduced more powerful Java EE, server-side JavaScript, HTML5 and versions of its services (such as Heroku XL). OData); compatibility with SAP on-premises NetWeaver Java Application Server, which • The well-established identity of Salesforce as enables hybrid architectures; native integration a SaaS/CRM provider creates the perception with SAP on-premises and cloud applications; of its platform offering as secondary, leading and colocation with SAP SaaS offerings make many advanced enterprise application projects SAP Hana Cloud Platform AppServices an to look elsewhere for a suitable technology attractive proposition for user organizations and business partner to address their complete and ISVs looking for an aPaaS to extend SAP enterprise needs. The Salesforce1 Platform application offerings on the basis of fully cloud- initiative is aimed at addressing this issue, but based or hybrid architectures. changing or extending a brand identity is a difficult undertaking. • Integrated support with the SAP Hana in- memory DBMS enables user organizations • Force.com uses fixed pricing (per user and and ISVs to develop innovative applications application) when pricing for registered users that would be difficult or even impossible to (typically the tenant’s employees), which implement using traditional data management minimizes one of the common characteristics techniques. of a cloud platform: cost exposure that is proportional to use. Once the tenant saturates • Over the past 12 months, SAP Hana Cloud the allotted resources (a relatively rare Platform AppServices added a great deal of occurrence), there is no automatic upgrade, new functionality (including a new Web and and the manual upgrade is not self-service wizard-based high-productivity tool for fast 18

development of Web and mobile HTML5- • Despite its established and expanding based applications), and extended geographic openness and standard support, SAP Hana coverage by opening data centers in the U.S. Cloud Platform AppServices’ positioning and and Australia, and notably grew its customer strength of being deeply integrated with SAP base. Clients mention scalability, reliability, applications and technologies (SAP Hana, security, monitoring, seamless integration Solution Manager, SAPUI5, Fiori, etc.) risks with SAP ERP on-premises, open standards limiting its attractiveness for non-SAP-minded support, configuration management and SAP organizations or even for non-SAP-centric Hana database as notable characteristics of the projects of loyal SAP clients. platform. Software AG • The road map for the next 12 months increases Software AG’s aPaaS offering is webMethods SAP Hana Cloud Platform AppServices’ appeal AgileApps Cloud (previously Software AG AgileApps for organizations looking for a versatile aPaaS Live), based on the technology and service of by adding support for popular cloud open- LongJump, a company that Software AG acquired source technology (OpenStack, Cloud Foundry in 2013. webMethods AgileApps Cloud is a shared- and Docker), enabling greater openness and everything, cloud-native, high-productivity and extensibility; API management (including some process-oriented aPaaS. The technology is also technologies resold from ); support available as a software product for private cloud for SAP ASE and IQ DBMSs; support for the and ISV use, and is part of a broader PaaS offering SAP Fiori UI technology; integration with SAP also including a bpmPaaS (Aris Cloud) and an iPaaS Solution Manager for end-to-end operation (webMethods Integration Cloud), both based on management; event stream processing and the equivalent Software AG’s classic on-premises support for IoT connectivity protocols (e.g., technologies. MQTT); elastic scaling; improved security and high availability; and deployment on more data Strength centers (including in China). Later, SAP Hana Cloud Platform will also be extended with BPM • Software AG is a well-entrenched enterprise and business rule management capabilities, application infrastructure player, with an and with options for on-premises and third- installed base of over 10,000 clients for its party IaaS offering deployment. Aris (business process modeling), webMethods (integration middleware) and Adabas/Natural Cautions (mainframe-based DBMS and application development tools). This gives the vendor a solid • Clients cite limited functionality of the portal enterprise provider reputation and a powerful capability, a user experience development cross-selling opportunity for its PaaS offering. environment (SAPUI5) not suitable to support consumer-oriented application development, a • In addition to a wealth of incremental lack of standardized disaster recovery options, a technical improvements, over the past 12 lack of data centers in Asia and Latin America, months, Software AG added several business- and some challenges in the sales process as process-oriented capabilities to its aPaaS, areas for improvement. such as BPMN 2.0 process modeling, business rule management, case management, task • Although SAP Hana Cloud Platform AppServices management, ad hoc process/task creation, made progress in adoption and functionality, it social network integration and HTML5 mobile remains a well-kept secret, even for loyal SAP device support, thus increasing the appeal of clients and partners, thus slowing down the the platform for use cases beyond its traditional, pace of adoption and limiting the perception of LOB-level target. its strategic relevance. • Clients mention easy-to-use and intuitive • Its technical merits and fast growth development and management tooling, fast notwithstanding, the SAP Hana Cloud Platform application deployment, seamless mobile device AppServices client base is still much smaller support, integration features, reliability, hybrid than the leading aPaaS providers. deployment model support, and effective and responsive technical support as notable qualities of the offering. 19

• The webMethods AgileApps Cloud road map development experience that is usable by citizen targets closer integration with Software AG’s developers. The platform uses a directly executable on-premises webMethods products (BPMS, metadata-driven model to describe all aspects of ESB and API Portal). Terracotta BigMemory an application. Zoho Creator offers high-control in-memory technology and Terracotta Universal capabilities through its model-driven visual Messaging message-oriented middleware scripting environment to construct code using a will be incorporated in the platform. The road proprietary language called Deluge (Data-Enriched map also includes a Java/Spring application Language for the Universal Grid Environment). It is container, an application marketplace, IoT available only as a public cloud hosted PaaS, with support, enterprise content management future plans for partial on-premises deployment and document management capabilities, API support. Zoho Creator can be used to orchestrate management, support for citizen integrators the use of the Zoho Office Suite, which includes (Action Framework), better integration with enterprise productivity SaaS applications, such as the webMethods Integration Cloud iPaaS, Zoho CRM. and deployment in European and Australian data centers, thus improving the platform’s Strengths attractiveness and making it available in a broader set of geographies than the U.S. • Zoho Creator is a very easy-to-use platform. It offers drag-and-drop configuration of the Cautions metadata model used to build an application. Applications can be built quickly, with little or • Over the past 12 months, Software AG added no involvement from IT staff. only a small number of new logos to the webMethods AgileApps Cloud client list. This • Zoho Creator is very “cloudy.” The platform limited sales effectiveness, coupled with an abstracts all management of elasticity of installed based almost entirely in the U.S. and compute and storage resources from the inherited from LongJump, indicates that the developer. All tenants are hosted on shared vendor hasn’t yet devised an effective global resources, with logical tenant separation. It sales strategy for an offering and delivery also meets enterprise availability and reliability model with which it is not familiar. Further needs. prolonged sales stagnation may challenge the offering’s long-term viability. • Citizen developers and IT leaders charged with supporting citizen developers may find Zoho • Software AG’s conservative sales, marketing, Creator’s pricing attractive. While not the most partnership and geographic-expansion strategy, powerful application development platform, it primarily focused on serving its traditional is inexpensive and meets the high-productivity client base, is likely not sufficiently aggressive application development needs for citizen to fuel the rapid growth, widespread adoption developers looking to build database-centric and ample third-party support that is needed to business applications. A citizen developer can gain momentum in the highly competitive and build moderately complex business applications fast-growing aPaaS market. within the confines of the model.

• Software AG’s aPaaS road map addresses • Zoho Creator is easily integrated with other high-control capabilities in a limited way and products in the Zoho Office Suite, as well as a doesn’t include autoscaling, thus limiting its handful of other services, such as Salesforce appeal for users and ISVs looking for a platform and QuickBooks. Additional integrations can be to address advanced requirements. created using Deluge.

• Clients mention the following as areas in need Cautions of improvement: documentation, a lack of data centers in Europe and the Asia/Pacific region, • While Deluge allows developers high-control and a relatively rigid pricing model. capabilities and enables the construction of custom logic, it only allows composition using Zoho existing functions provided by the platform; no Zoho Creator is high-productivity, database- third-party libraries are supported. centric business aPaaS. It emphasizes a low-code 20

• The Zoho Creator platform offers little Dropped portability. It does not use standard metadata • AppPoint Software Solutions – This vendor models and is only available on publicly hosted did not meet the more demanding inclusion cloud infrastructure. criteria, including the revenue and number of paying customer thresholds. • While Zoho Creator offers administrative and deployment features, it does not support full • CloudBees – This vendor exited the aPaaS application life cycle management. The vendor market; it discontinued its RUN@cloud service has only recently (in February 2015) added to focus all business resources on DEV@ more testing and versioning capabilities. cloud application development life cycle Zoho Creator also provides no API access to management (ADLM) PaaS. administrative capabilities. • Docker – This vendor exited the aPaaS market: • The Zoho suite of tools has long been focused it sold its aPaaS business to cloudControl and on serving the needs of the SMB market is focusing entirely on its Docker container segment. Zoho Creator is meant to address the technology. need for simplistic data-centric applications. It struggles to provide enough flexibility to • CenturyLink-Tier 3 – After the acquisition of support applications that require complex Tier 3, the vendor retired its WebFabric aPaaS logic, third-party libraries and integrations offering, and is focusing on its Tier 3 IaaS required by many enterprise applications. offering; CenturyLink AppFog did not meet Zoho Creator does not offer subtenant self- the revenue and number of paying customer service management, limiting the ability of ISV thresholds. partners to provide SaaS applications to their customers. Support is only available 24/5, with • WSO2 – This vendor retreated from the aPaaS no weekend telephone support. market to redesign its offering and to re- enter with a more functionally complete and Vendors Added and Dropped competitive aPaaS offering. The new App Cloud We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for did not meet the revenue and number of paying Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets customer. change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria may change over time. A vendor’s appearance in To be included in this research, a vendor must a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and deliver a service with the following characteristics not the next does not necessarily indicate that (all evaluated as of 1 September 2014): we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market • It has to be a cloud service: and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor. • Available by subscription and accessible over Internet technologies Added • OrangeScape, OutSystems and Zoho were • Available uniformly to all qualified added. These three vendors of high-productivity subscribers aPaaS were deemed to offer sufficient cloud and enterprise capabilities, and were • Includes some sharing of physical resources estimated to exceed the admission thresholds between logically isolated tenants on revenue and number of paying customers. Bimodal enterprise IT calls for complementary • Includes some self-service provisioning and requirements for both high-productivity and management by subscribers high-control aPaaS capabilities, which allows more high-productivity aPaaS providers to • Includes bidirectional scaling without compete in the enterprise aPaaS market. interruption of activities and with some automation

• Includes some instrumentation for tracking of operations 21

• It has to be a PaaS: not yet implemented sufficient cloudiness or did not target enterprise-style software projects • Encapsulates the underlying system by 1 September 2014. Some of the vendors and infrastructure and hardware, and its offerings in this category include: procurement, management and direct costs, and does not require subscribers to be aware • Acumatica Cloud xRP of it (optional access is OK) • appsFreedom • Takes responsibility for patching, versioning and health of the platform software • Caspio Bridge

• It has to be an aPaaS: • Fhoster Platform

• Supports deployment and execution of • HP Helion encoded application logic • IS Tools Cloud Platform • Includes development tools for encoding of general-purpose application logic and some • KeyedIn Konfigure management of application life cycle • NTT Data Intramart Accel Platform • It has to be enterprise-grade: • Oracle Java Cloud Service • Includes some support for high availability and disaster recovery • Pivotal Web Services

• Provides some technical support to paying • ServiceNow Service Automation Platform subscribers • WebRatio Platform • Includes some provisions for securing access to application services We recommend that you examine these vendors’ offerings in addition to those evaluated in this • Enables formation of SOA-style service APIs Magic Quadrant. Many may have advanced to meet for external access to application logic and/ your cloud application PaaS requirements. or data All vendors in the market will be examined again • Allows invocation of external service APIs for the 2016 version of this Magic Quadrant.

• It has to be generally available. Evaluation Criteria Ability to Execute • It must have more than 30 paying customers. Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes, • It must have more than $1 million in annual systems, methods or procedures that enable IT revenue. provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively impact revenue, The aPaaS market is rapidly changing. This retention and reputation. Ultimately, technology research represents a snapshot in time. Multiple providers are judged on their ability and success in vendors in the cloud platform market do not capitalizing on their vision. appear because they did not meet the revenue or the count of paying customers thresholds, have 22

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria • Functional completeness (breadth of offering; Medium) and functionality of an application Evaluation Criteria Weighting platform, including some or all of: Product or Service High • Execution of encoded application logic Overall Viability Medium • Multitype data access Sales Execution/Pricing Medium Market Responsiveness/ Medium • Multichannel applications Record • Composite applications Marketing Execution Medium • Messaging Customer Experience High Operations Medium • Cloud-aware development Source: Gartner (March 2015) • Life cycle management tools (DevOps)

To evaluate the functional capabilities of vendors’ • API management available enterprise aPaaS offerings, we examined the vendors’ current services and their record in • Monitoring, management and administration the market for the following characteristics: of application execution • Degree of cloudiness (Medium), including some • Openness (High), including some or all of: or all of: • Application portability across on-premises • Self-service access to provisioning, single-tenant, private and public cloud monitoring and management of platform and deployments applications • Application portability with third-party aPaaS • API access to provisioning, monitoring and management of platform and applications • Platform portability with third-party IaaS

• Sharing of resources between tenants • Support of standards (de facto or de jure)

• Tenant isolation • Use of open-source components

• Bidirectional scaling and autoscaling • Developer access to advanced design and operation (Medium), including some or all of: • Resource use tracking • Multiple language support and mixed • Enterprise worthiness (Medium), including some multilingual programming (polyglot) or all of: • Programming frameworks/libraries • High availability • Request/reply communication protocols and • Disaster recovery models • Secure access • Messaging, event-driven and publish/ subscribe (pub/sub) communications • High-volume throughput protocols models • SLAs • Programmatic access to data sources • Exposure and access to near and far • Custom design of service APIs for near and application APIs far access • Technical support 23

• Programmatic invocation of external (near • Architectural versatility (Medium), including and far) service APIs support for some or all of:

• Interaction with API management tools • Service-oriented architecture (SOA)

• Subtenancy • Event-driven architecture (EDA)

• In-memory computing • Microservices

• Parallel computing • Software-defined application services (SDAS)

• Integrated tooling for: • Model-View-Controller (MVC)

• Application design • State-transition modeling

• Development • Batch processing

• Life cycle management and • Eventual consistency (BASE) administration (DevOps) • Atomic consistency (ACID) • Developer productivity and ease of operation (High), including some or all of: • In-memory computing

• Model-driven encoding of: • Context-aware computing

• Business logic Completeness of Vision Gartner analysts evaluate technology providers • Process flow on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements about current and future market • Multistyle data direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive forces and how well they map to the • Multistyle/multidevice UI Gartner position. Ultimately, technology providers are rated on their understanding of how market • Automatic and protected support of cloud forces can be exploited to create opportunity for characteristics the provider.

• Libraries of prebuilt applications: Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria • Services (executable) Evaluation Criteria Weighting • Software modules (source) Market Understanding High Marketing Strategy Medium • Data models/schemas Sales Strategy Medium • Data content Offering (Product) High Strategy • Integrated high-productivity tooling for: Business Model Low • Management Vertical/Industry Low Strategy • Testing Innovation Medium • Deployment Geographic Strategy Medium Source: Gartner (March 2015) • Versioning 24

To evaluate the forward strategy for functional • Life cycle management tools (DevOps) capabilities of vendors’ enterprise aPaaS offerings, we examined the available road maps and • API management credibly committed initiatives for the following characteristics: • Monitoring, management and administration of application execution • Degree of cloudiness (Medium), including some or all of: • Openness (Medium), including some or all of:

• Self-service access to provisioning, • Application portability across on-premises monitoring and management of platform and single-tenant, private and public cloud applications deployments

• API access to provisioning, monitoring and • Application portability with third-party aPaaS management of platform and applications • Platform portability with third-party IaaS • Sharing of resources between tenants • Support of standards (de facto or de jure) • Tenant isolation • Use of open-source components • Bidirectional scaling and autoscaling • Developer access to advanced design and • Resource use tracking operation (High), including some or all of:

• Enterprise worthiness (Medium), including some • Multiple language support and mixed or all of: multilingual programming (polyglot)

• High availability • Programming frameworks/libraries

• Disaster recovery • Request/reply communication protocols and models • Secure access • Messaging, event-driven and pub/sub • High-volume throughput communications protocols models

• SLAs • Programmatic access to data sources

• Exposure and access to near and far • Custom design of service APIs for near and application APIs far access

• Technical support • Programmatic invocation of external (near and far) service APIs • Functional completeness (breadth of offering; High) and functionality of an application • Interaction with API management tools platform, including some or all of: • Subtenancy • Execution of encoded application logic • In-memory computing • Multitype data access • Parallel computing • Omnichannel applications • Integrated tooling for: • Composite applications • Application design • Messaging • Development • Cloud-aware development 25

• Life cycle management and • ACID administration (DevOps) • In-memory computing • Developer productivity and ease of operation (High), including some or all of: • Context-aware computing

• Model-driven encoding of: Quadrant Descriptions Leaders • Business logic Leaders in a market combine an insightful understanding of the realities of the market, • Process flow a reliable record, the ability to influence the market’s direction, the capability to attract and • Multistyle data keep a following, and the capacity to lead. • Multistyle/multidevice UI In the enterprise aPaaS market, leadership implies • Automatic and protected support of cloud an understanding of the demands of the enterprise characteristics and the opportunities of cloud computing, and a genuine commitment to enterprise cloud • Libraries of prebuilt applications: computing. A Leader must have demonstrated a market-leading vision and the ability to deliver on • Services (executable), that vision. In this new and still emerging market, few vendors have been in it for long enough to • Software modules (source) demonstrate sustainable leadership, but multiple vendors are advancing in this direction. We expect • Data models/schemas notable changes in the market by the time this research is refreshed for 2016. • Data content A Leader is not always the best choice for a • Integrated high-productivity tooling for: particular enterprise initiative. A focused, smaller vendor can provide excellent support and • Management commitment to individual customers, especially when geographic or vertical industry specifics, or • Testing the need for a deep capability and commitment to specific features/functions, are important. Such • Deployment a vendor would not be rated as a Leader in the overall market, but within a specific segment, it • Versioning may be treated as such.

• Architectural versatility (High), including Challengers support for some or all of: Challengers in a market excel in their ability to • SOA attract a large user following, but this ability is limited to a subset segment of the market. For • EDA members of that target audience, Challengers can be treated as Leaders, but that specificity presents • Microservices a barrier to adoption for those outside the segment.

• SDAS In the enterprise aPaaS market, a Challenger may have a strong proven presence and following in • MVC the Web or mobile development market, but lack traction, commitment or insight in the enterprise • State-transition modeling market. A Challenger must demonstrate a sustained excellence in execution and must have • Batch processing amassed a significant following, which is hard to achieve in this new, still evolving and forming • BASE market. Only one vendor is rated as a Challenger in 26

the enterprise aPaaS market this year, but multiple or to other markets, or they may be subject to vendors are likely to reach that level of execution excessively conservative risk-averse leadership. in the coming years. In the enterprise aPaaS market, many Niche A Challenger can evolve into a Leader if it adopts Players are providers that just recently entered aggressive, innovative strategies to expand to the market with only a limited set of capabilities the full-breadth target market; demonstrates and have not yet articulated a broad vision and exceptional insight in understanding of IT market road map, either in technology or in go-to-market directions; and retains the capability to deliver on terms. its vision. Niche Players often represent the best choice for Visionaries a specific category of buyer, or for a particular use Visionaries in a market are innovators that drive case. They typically offer specialized expertise, the market forward by responding to emerging focused support practices, flexible terms and leading-edge customer demands and by conditions, and greater dedication to a particular offering the businesses of their customers’ new market segment and its customers. opportunities to excel. Typically, these vendors appeal to leading-edge customers, and may Some Niche Players will improve their ability to have minimal mainstream presence or name execute and evolve into Challengers. Others will recognition. Their ability to deliver sustained discover innovative solutions that attract interest dependable execution in the mainstream beyond their niche segments and will emerge enterprise markets is not sufficiently tested. as Visionaries. Some will look to strengthen and Note that the vision of a vendor is not expressed broaden their businesses to challenge the Leaders. just in its technological innovation; insightful In this fast-changing and consolidating market, understanding of market trends is also required for opportunities exist for all comers. visionary marketing, sales, product and business Context management strategies. The enterprise aPaaS market is formed by vendors In the aPaaS market, some visionary vendors aiming to provide enterprise customers with a are investing in leading-edge enterprise aPaaS cloud platform for the development and execution services not yet readily adopted by mainstream of cloud-based applications and business solutions. enterprise customers, including support of The enterprise aPaaS market targets subscribers big data and stream analytics, IoT, and native in midsize to large business settings, building mobile computing. Other Visionaries excel in new software-based solutions, but constrained by understanding enterprise demands on the road to enterprise requirements, policies and regulations. cloud adoption, and support high productivity for LOB users; polyglot high-control for IT developers; This research covers only the vendors with aPaaS integration, orchestration and API management for offerings aimed at enterprise customers; however, composite application services; and self-service within this category, vendors still differ in multiple management for hybrid application deployments. dimensions by the way they envision enterprise realities, requirements, opportunities and best Some Visionaries will eventually grow to become practices in cloud computing: Leaders or will be acquired by them (or by Challengers seeking a leadership position in the • Developer experience (see “Productivity vs. market). Others will limit their target markets to Control: Cloud Application Platforms Must focus on their core competencies and will become Split to Win”): Niche Players, or they will grow in their specialty to become Challengers. • High productivity: A model-driven graphical development environment, typically Niche Players producing metadata that is interpreted at runtime. Some programming is possible, Niche Players in a market typically specialize in but the core of the application is designed a vertical, geographical or functional specialty, graphically and is interpreted at runtime. therefore addressing only a segment of a market. Typically proprietary and limited to the Neither their execution nor vision is market- more common application design patterns. leading; often, these are vendors in transition from Typically suitable for LOB developers, but 27

also useful for many less unique projects • Architecture (see “What IT Leaders Need to at central IT. Ensures a certain degree of Know About Application PaaS Models and application cloudiness. Typically not suitable Use Patterns”): for unique or advanced application designs. • IaaS plus middleware (not PaaS): • High control: A programming environment Subscriber provisions VMs and chooses the based on established on-premises models middleware technology deployed over the (Java, Ruby, .NET) that allows for the design VMs. Subscriber is partly or fully responsible of more unique and advanced applications for configuring, tuning and versioning of than the high-productivity offerings, but middleware and the underlying OS, and also imposes greater responsibilities on the pays for the use of IaaS resources as well as in creating cloud-compatible for the middleware. Subscriber arranges for applications (stateless, scalable, service- scaling (typically at additional cost). Provider oriented, instrumented for management). does not “hide” the system infrastructure and Ease of use for the developers is the same leaves responsibility for the middleware to or less than with comparable on-premises the subscriber. Although this is middleware projects. functionality offered off a cloud environment, it is not a PaaS experience (or cost structure) • Model of elasticity (see “Gartner Reference for the subscriber. Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy”): Vendors that only offer this category of • Shared hardware: Multiple tenants may application platform service (such as share the resources of a physical machine, Amazon) do not qualify for Gartner’s aPaaS but each VM is exclusively dedicated to one market research, although they are the tenant. The increment of elasticity is the appropriate choice for some less strategic whole VM image. Isolation is implemented enterprise cloud projects. by the virtualization hypervisor. Elasticity is implemented by additional control software. • Cloud-based: Tenant isolation and elasticity are implemented by software that manages • Shared OS: Multiple tenants share an middleware (PaaS framework), not in the instance of a virtual or physical server middleware itself; therefore, the middleware OS, each isolated via OS containers. The can remain (nearly) fully backward- increment of elasticity is an instance of an compatible. Since middleware is unaware OS container, which is more lightweight of the cloud, the application designers than a whole VM, making elasticity and must be careful not to more fine-grained and more responsive violate multitenant cloud “citizenship” rules to changing demands (an OS container (avoid access to system resources and APIs, can be instantiated faster than a VM and, promptly release unused resources, persist therefore, can be triggered in response to state across invocations, and provide tracking smaller changes in demand). Isolation is APIs). implemented via OS containers. Elasticity is implemented by additional control software • Cloud-native: Middleware itself is designed (a PaaS framework). with cloud awareness and implements tenant detection, provisioning, isolation, • Shared container: Multiple tenants share resource allocation and elastic scaling. an instance of an application platform (aka The programming model supported by the application container). The increment of middleware also reflects the cloud context, elasticity can be a thread, a segment of enforcing cloud compliance of applications. real memory, a priority level or a database connector. Fine-grained elasticity is the most • Scope (see the Private PaaS technology efficient in responding to changing demands profile in “Hype Cycle for Platform as a and in density of the resource utilization. Service, 2014”): Tenant isolation and resource elasticity are implemented inside the application platform • Public: The aPaaS services are operated container. by the provider in the data center network of the provider’s choice. Software that 28

executes the application is unavailable In a bimodal IT world, the high-productivity for review or change, and is fixed and aPaaS may be required in central IT looking versioned exclusively by the provider (with for fast returns on investment, and high- the subscriber having some control over the control aPaaS may be needed in the LOBs timing of updates). as some of them become more technically skilled. The divide between the LOBs and • Hybrid: The provider of the public aPaaS central IT is becoming less pronounced as also offers the software that enables its cloud services that recognize the bimodal public service, as a software product that is nature of modern IT deliver new solutions. deployed and managed on-premises at a data center of the buyer’s choice. The software • SaaS ISVs: aPaaS targeting SaaS ISVs (a may not be 100% the same, but offers key customer category for aPaaS vendors) sufficient portability and interoperability for must provide full support of subtenancy, a homogeneous hybrid application PaaS. The because the objective of the ISVs is to sell vendor may retain a degree of control of the their application services to independent versioning of the software, even if it does not customers (their tenants). Successful SaaS control its day-to-day operations. ISVs will have thousands of tenants of their own. Support of subtenancy for ISVs • Private: Some vendors (such as ActiveState includes support of tracking and billing per and Apprenda) offer only CEAP software. subtenant, version control of the application They are not service providers and are not that is seamlessly delivered to subtenants, covered in this research, but their products management that allows the ISV to control should be evaluated along with the hybrid all subtenants (including scaling, failover, providers’ software, if the plan is to develop a backup/restore, noisy neighbor control and separately standing private PaaS. security), and the self-service management that is offered to subtenants. In other words, • Target audience (see “What IT Leaders Must the experience of a subtenant must, within Know About the Adoption of Platform as a its scope, be the same as the experience of Service”): the tenant (the ISV) itself.

• LOB developers: Application PaaS targeting • Costs: LOB citizen developers must offer high- productivity graphical design, and easy • Fixed: Priced in proportion to the number reference to application data and services. of registered users (with some established They offer high-productivity, model-driven scope boundaries, such as the number of design of UIs. Typically, LOB developers use data objects, and a ceiling on some physical these tools in conjunction with a SaaS. resources, such as bandwidth or storage, with variable overage costs). Users that • Enterprise IT developers: aPaaS targeting are significantly under the use thresholds enterprise IT organizations must support are paying a premium for the predictable development of one-of-a-kind application budget exposure, and relief from the burden services – some would choose high- of capacity planning and continuous productivity rapid results, while others use tracking. Minimal or no system would opt for high-control, more-advanced administration of the service is required of programming opportunities. The applications the subscriber. are the tenants of the aPaaS – sharing and competing for the resources between them. • Variable: Priced in proportion to use of Often, the applications have no tenants of their physical resources (models and techniques own and are deployed in the cloud for reasons of price calculation differ, but all include other than multitenancy (delegating system some floor and ceiling thresholds). Users management, time to results, attractive tools have an opportunity to align their costs to or pricing); however, in some cases, custom the patterns of use at the cost of having IT applications may be used by isolated to engage in continuous use tracking departments or branches within the subscriber and capacity planning. Users that have a organization, and those become tenants of the steady 24/7 demand pay a premium for application and subtenants of the aPaaS. the flexibility that they do not utilize. Some 29

system administration of the service by the in that time frame. The organization commitment subscriber is essential. to the aPaaS market is strategic, but adoption of specific vendors and technologies in 2015 should • Prepaid credit: Subscriber makes a dollar be tactical. deposit into a provider-held “bank.” The use of all provided cloud services is charged Users come to aPaaS from first adopting SaaS or to the bank in proportion of resource use IaaS, or directly. SaaS customers look to aPaaS to (a variable model; see above), but the establish differentiation through customization subscriber experiences the costs as a fixed and extension of the generally available SaaS schedule of deposits into the bank at regular capabilities. IaaS customers look to aPaaS to established intervals. The adjustments to improve DevOps productivity and to allow the the deposit amount are made as needed IT organization to concentrate on differentiating to match resource consumption, but are business solutions, instead of the health of expected to be relatively rare. This model the enabling technology. More visionary users offers a combination of both fixed and recognize that aPaaS offers an opportunity to variable pricing, and also enables the create unique cloud solutions (unlike the generally subscriber to take advantage of all current available SaaS), while avoiding the burden of and future capabilities offered by the provider developing custom cloud capabilities (unlike the without negotiating contracts separately for use of plain IaaS). The rate of adoption of aPaaS is each new feature. growing and so is the maturity of the offerings.

Users are advised to establish where Some of the key trends in the aPaaS market an aPaaS offering belongs across these include: categories when evaluating and contrasting vendor candidates. Although a given • Most platform technology innovation goes into project may be more sensitive to some of the cloud platforms (the “cloud first” strategy). the categories than others, all will have As the result, users seeking the leading-edge an impact on the overall experience of platform capabilities are pushed to cloud the subscriber utilizing a selected service. deployments. Understanding this impact in relation to the project objectives is the responsibility of • More on-premises application platforms the buyer, which should not be delegated are updated to be cloud-ready, drawing IT to vendors or advisers, because the organizations to private aPaaS and then hybrid consequences of a wrong choice can span aPaaS. the spectrum from negligible to severe. • aPaaS offerings begin to challenge traditional Market Overview platform middleware for mainstream projects, and not only for experimental, cloud-centric The enterprise aPaaS market remains relatively initiatives. unsettled. It is the smallest of the three major cloud market categories (IaaS and SaaS being the • The aPaaS market remains under construction other two). Although we identify current Leaders in – new versions of Cloud Foundry, Azure Cloud this research, the long-term, sustained leadership Services, IBM aPaaS and other offerings carry in the market remains open to new players. substantial internal design changes. This unsettled state attracts many new vendors aiming at carving out a market share in a strategic • PaaS frameworks (like Cloud Foundry, OpenShift software market. Some major IT vendors like and Apache Stratos) form the foundation for Oracle and HP have still yet to enter the market comprehensive PaaS suite offerings. with a full strategic investment. The market is open to new ideas and new business models. Users • New forms of xPaaS continue to emerge, driven are advised to be prepared for change, including by emerging use cases (e.g., business analytics, potential discontinuities. Therefore, the best user stream processing and mobile back end; IoT adoption model is for projects with an ROI within is expected to emerge as well) – most joining two to three years from the start, in case a new the core aPaaS capabilities to begin to form prevailing approach to cloud application design comprehensive PaaS offerings. or a new market leadership composition emerges 30

• Traditional middleware vendors, pushed Evaluation Criteria Definitions by open-source and cloud-native PaaS Ability to Execute competitors, enter the aPaaS market to defend Product/Service: Core goods and services offered their client base and boost their stagnant by the vendor for the defined market. This includes revenue, but face challenging business model current product/service capabilities, quality, transition issues. feature sets, skills and so on, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships • Hybrid aPaaS emerges as the strategic platform as defined in the market definition and detailed in for large organizations seeking to preserve the subcriteria. their investment while embracing innovation; while medium and some small enterprises Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment strategically focus on public aPaaS to gain the of the overall organization’s financial health, the benefit of scale and excellence available in financial and practical success of the business unit, the public cloud that is unattainable with their and the likelihood that the individual business limited resources. unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the • aPaaS leaders invest in offering both high- state of the art within the organization’s portfolio control and high-productivity services to meet of products. the growing prevalence of bimodal IT. Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor’s • Open source has emerged as the new de facto capabilities in all presales activities and the standard – Linux, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, structure that supports them. This includes deal Docker, Kubernetes, polyglot 3GL frameworks management, pricing and negotiation, presales (Rails, Tomcat, etc.), MySQL, Hadoop, etc. All support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales are seen by users as ensuring portability and channel. reducing vendor lock-in. Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to • The divide between IaaS and aPaaS is becoming respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve less pronounced as some leading platforms, like competitive success as opportunities develop, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, competitors act, customer needs evolve and offer a contiguous suite of IaaS and PaaS market dynamics change. This criterion also capabilities. considers the vendor’s history of responsiveness. • The divide between aPaaS and SaaS is Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, narrowing as well, as some aPaaS providers creativity and efficacy of programs designed to offer prebuilt business logic frameworks or deliver the organization’s message to influence libraries with their development environments the market, promote the brand and business, to improve developer productivity, and in the increase awareness of the products, and establish a process advance their aPaaS to aPaaS+. positive identification with the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This “mind • IoT pushes stream processing, event processing, share” can be driven by a combination of publicity, real-time analytics, in-memory computing and promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of real-time context-aware business decisions to mouth and sales activities. the center of new applications and business solutions, putting pressure on platform providers (including aPaaS) to adjust and expand into digital business. 31

Customer Experience: Relationships, products Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products and services/programs that enable clients to that uses the appropriate network of direct be successful with the products evaluated. and indirect sales, marketing, service, and Specifically, this includes the ways customers communication affiliates that extend the scope receive technical support or account support. This and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, can also include ancillary tools, customer support technologies, services and the customer base. programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on. Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor’s approach to product development and delivery Operations: The ability of the organization to that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, meet its goals and commitments. Factors include methodology and feature sets as they map to the quality of the organizational structure, current and future requirements. including skills, experiences, programs, systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to Business Model: The soundness and logic of the operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing vendor’s underlying business proposition. basis. Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor’s strategy Completeness of Vision to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor the specific needs of individual market segments, to understand buyers’ wants and needs and to including vertical markets. translate those into products and services. Vendors Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and that show the highest degree of vision listen to synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or and understand buyers’ wants and needs, and can capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or shape or enhance those with their added vision. pre-emptive purposes. Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of Geographic Strategy: The vendor’s strategy to consistently communicated throughout direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the the organization and externalized through the specific needs of geographies outside the “home” website, advertising, customer programs and or native geography, either directly or through positioning statements. partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

Source: Gartner Research, G00271188, Yefim V. Natis, Anne Thomas, Massimo Pezzini, Rob Dunie, Kimihiko Iijima, 24 March 2015 32

About Mendix

Mendix empowers companies to deliver multi- channel applications faster and with better results, so that they can accelerate their digital transformation and capitalize on new opportunities. The Mendix App Platform brings IT and business together in one collaborative environment that allows cross-functional teams • Full App Delivery Cycle – Mendix covers to design, build, deploy and manage apps at the full app delivery cycle, including design, unprecedented speed. development, testing, deployment, and application management capabilities. Companies use Mendix to build connected apps that engage customers, empower employees and • Cloud Native – Mendix’s cloud-native improve business operations. Often, Mendix is used architecture is optimized for fully automated to enable a ‘fast lane’ within a bimodal IT strategy. cloud deployment and runs on 3rd party public In this scenario, traditional development teams cloud platforms, private clouds, and on premise. focus on core systems while cross-functional teams use Mendix to address emerging and urgent • Open Technology – Mendix’s open architecture application needs. allows you to integrate virtually any existing application, cloud service and file system using The Mendix App Platform accelerates time to open standards. market by focusing on the following aspects: To learn more, visit: www.mendix.com • For IT & Business – Mendix supports active involvement of business stakeholders throughout the entire application lifecycle, greatly increasing project success rates.

• Rapid App Development – Mendix’s visual development approach empowers both developers and business users to rapidly build powerful multi-device apps, without labor- intensive, low-level coding.

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