February 01, 2011, 4:35 PM — One year after Microsoft introduced Windows Azure, the platform-as-a-service market is only about 1/20 the size of the rival infrastructure-as-a-service market led by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, and about 1/50 the size of the software-as-a-service market.
While enterprises will spend $112 billion on public cloud services over the next five years, only a small fraction of that amount will be devoted to platform clouds such as Windows Azure, according to Gartner.
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So far, Windows Azure has 31,000 active subscribers and is hosting 5,000 applications, whereas competitors Google and Salesforce.com each claim at least 150,000 applications on their platforms. Microsoft, which opened Azure to the public on Feb. 1, 2010, acknowledges the market is a "longer-term play." Azure's leadership is in flux, with the departures of top executives Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia.
"Platform-as-a-service adoption across the board has been lagging infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service," says Gartner analyst Richard Watson. "It's pretty anemic, especially when you talk about the enterprise market."
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Gartner estimates 2010 revenue for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) at $140 million, compared to $2.7 billion for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds, according to an excerpt of a Market Profile report the analyst firm has not yet released.
PaaS revenue is expected to grow to $200 million in 2011 and to $650 million by 2014. But IaaS revenue will also soar to $4.4 billion in 2011 and $12.4 billion by 2014, according to the report.
SaaS revenues are expected to reach nearly $10 billion in 2011, and $20 billion in 2014.
