PaaS Provider Comparison GuideBy Dan SullivanJULY 23, 2013 9:27 AM

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1. Finding the Right PaaS for Your Needs

Software development has long

required a combination of programming, design and system administration skills. If your project

required an integrated development environment, an application server and a database then you, or

someone on your team, would have to install, configure and maintain those components. These

activities do not provide for distinguishing features of your software: they are simply overhead

activities that leave less time for innovative software design and development. What if you could

make that overhead go away or at least shift the responsibility to a service provider? That is the

promise of Platform as a Service (PaaS).

PaaS is a type of cloud service model that offers developers relief from some aspects of systems

management while allowing sufficient flexibility in software development to design and deploy

custom applications in the cloud. PaaS services offer a combination of Infrastructure as a Service

(IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) features. Like IaaS, PaaS is used to develop Web and

mobile applications using a wide array of components, ranging from programming languages and

application servers to message queues and databases. Like, SaaS, these components are

preconfigured and maintained by the service provider and typically offered as multi-tenancy services.

IaaS providers offer commodity services, such as virtual machines and block storages that are

sometimes difficult to differentiate from competitors’ offerings. PaaS vendors offer higher level

services and therefore have more opportunity to offers specialized services and focus on a

particular type of developer. For example, a Java PaaS provider might offer well integrated Java

application server, source code management, and continuous integration tools. Other PaaS

providers may target developers using multiple languages by offering support for PHP, Ruby,

Python, Perl and other popular Web development languages. The increasing importance of mobile

applications presents another area in which PaaS providers can differentiate their product lines from

those of other vendors.

This PaaS Provider Comparison series examines several PaaS providers, including:

PaaS Provider Comparison Guide:

Engine Yard

Red Hat OpenShift

Google App Engine

Heroku

AppFog

Windows Azure Cloud Services

Amazon AWS

Caspio

This is not a comprehensive list of PaaS providers but it is a sample of different types of PaaS

offerings. Some of these vendors specialize in PaaS, such as Engine Yard, Heroku and AppFrog.

Some, such as Amazon AWS and Windows Azure, are also IaaS providers. The fact that they have

PaaS offerings as well demonstrates the lines between IaaS and PaaS are blurring.

The purpose of this PaaS Provider Comparison Guide is to provide you with an overview of some

the PaaS offerings currently available, describe features and costs, and discuss some key

considerations when evaluating and choosing a PaaS. Several aspects of PaaS offerings will be

covered.

Dan Sullivan is an author, systems architect, and consultant with

over 20 years of IT experience with engagements in systems architecture, enterprise security,

advanced analytics and business intelligence. He has worked in a broad range of industries,

including financial services, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, software development, government,

retail, gas and oil production, power generation, life sciences, and education.  Dan has written 16

books and numerous articles and white papers about topics ranging from data warehousing, cloud

computing and advanced analytics to security management, collaboration, and text mining.

2. Key PaaS Considerations

Programming Languages & Server Side Technologies

Choosing a programming language or languages is an obvious early and important step in a software

development project. The languages we use can strongly influence programming paradigms, other tools and

components we deploy. This is one of there reasons language specific PaaS can establish themselves with a

niche market.

Server side technologies also strongly influence how we design applications. Commonly used server side

technologies such as .NET, PHP, and Java are widely supported by PaaS providers. One factor you should

consider when choosing a PaaS is how likely you are to continue to use the current mix of programming

languages and server side technologies. If you are strongly committed to .NETarchitecture  then working

with a .NET centric PaaS makes sense. If your development team works with multiple languages and server

side technologies then a polyglot PaaS is likely a better fit.

Data Storage

Data storage options are increasing. In the not too distant past, developers and database designers typically

chose between custom file-based storage or relational databases. When choosing the latter, it was often

between a handful of open source or commercial relational database management systems. Today, developers

still have those options as well as NoSQL options that include JSON document stores and graph databases.

When choosing a PaaS, consider your data storage needs. If you are deploying a transaction processing system

and your customers expect low latency and consistent performance then consider the ability to provision the

needed level of IOps. If scalability is paramount then a distributed, NoSQL key value data store might be the

right choice for your application.

Tool & Application Integration & Support

Support for developer tools is another consideration when evaluating a PaaS vendor. Some PaaS providers

offer integration with tools like Visual Studio and Eclipse. Solid integration can help reduce the time and

overhead associated with uploading and managing code between developers' machines and the PaaS servers.

The same goes for code management tools such as Git. A PaaS that works well with your source code

management tool can save time and reduce the risk of errors when deploying code to PaaS servers.

Also consider how your application in the PaaS cloud will integrate with other applications. Can your data

store be shared with other applications in the PaaS cloud? If you need to provide data to another application

will data have to be exported? Can you automatically replicate data to another database? There are many

advantages to having a PaaS provider manage database services but those advantages also come with

restrictions. You may need to find ways to work around some PaaS restrictions in some cases.

Cost & Budgets

In addition to the various technical considerations, we must also consider the cost of running your

applications in a PaaS. It is reasonable to expect that a PaaS service will cost more than a comparable IaaS

service that leaves you to manage the software infrastructure. Consider the markup on these services as you

evaluate the value of a PaaS.

Also consider your options for optimizing your PaaS configuration. For example, what information is

available to you to assess the efficiency of your configuration? Of course one of the advantages of a PaaS is

that we should not have to manage these lower level implementation details but we need to balance that goal

with the need to manage our budgets.

The articles in this PaaS Provider Comparison Guide will delve into more detail on several PaaS offerings

with the goal of introducing you to the different platforms so you can make the right purchasing decision. Stay

tuned!

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service7 January 2014 ID:G00254917

Analyst(s): Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Mark Driver, David Mitchell Smith, Kimihiko Iijima, Ross Altman

VIEW SUMMARY

Enterprise CIOs, IT planners and architects at a growing number of organizations are turning to the cloud for their new application initiatives. We examine the leading vendor offerings in the enterprise aPaaS market designed to support and advance these initiatives.

Market Definition/DescriptionApplication infrastructure (middleware) functionality enriched with cloud characteristics and offered uniformly to all qualified subscribers, as a service, while encapsulating and hiding the underlying system infrastructure, is a platform as a service (PaaS; Gartner refers to it more precisely as cloud application infrastructure services).A PaaS that is designed to enable runtime deployment, management and maintenance of cloud business application services is an application PaaS (aPaaS).An aPaaS that is designed to support the enterprise requirements for business applications and application projects is an enterprise aPaaS.Enterprise aPaaS is a cloud service. Although software facilitates its functionality, the ultimate deliverable is a service, and the vendor evaluations in this research are of service providers (that utilize software "behind the scenes"), rather than software vendors.See "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013" for an expanded definition of aPaaS and other forms of cloud application infrastructure services (PaaS).

Magic QuadrantFigure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service

Source: Gartner (January 2014)

Vendor Strengths and CautionsAppPoint Software SolutionsAppPoint Software Solutions is headquartered in India and provides the AppsOnAzure aPaaS offering, a cloud services rendition of its BizApp Studio .NET-based application development platform, deployed on Microsoft Azure.AppsOnAzure is completely compatible with BizApp Studio, and applications are fully portable between the two platforms. AppsOnAzure is based on a shared container, elastically scalable multitenancy model enabled by the metadata-based architecture of the product.Strengths

AppsOnAzure provides a rich set of aPaaS capabilities supported by a browser-based, model-driven development environment, including process integration, an integrated set of application and data integration features, and support for mobility.

AppsOnAzure's 12-month road map includes notable items such as autoscaling; subtenancy; and support for DevOps APIs, analytics and mobile analytics, NoSQL, and collaboration.

Some customers mention the zero coding, rapid development environment and the AppPoint's flexibility as the major benefits of working with the vendor.Cautions

Most AppPoint clients have deployed the on-premises BizApp Studio, and only a dozen or so leverage the cloud-based AppsOnAzure rendition, typically for relatively small-scale production deployments.

The vendor has minimal brand awareness and limited (although from some notable system integrators) third-party support. It has limited plans to improve its market visibility.

AppPoint clients mention the current analytical capabilities, a lack of SLA commitments and the vendor's ability to meet agreed-on deadlines as areas of desired improvement.CenturyLink-Tier 3This evaluation covers the Tier 3 aPaaS offering. The company was acquired by CenturyLink as we were finishing this research. Although we are reflecting on the consequences of the acquisition in this Magic Quadrant, the rating remains only of the Tier 3 component of the larger CenturyLink technology portfolio. CenturyLink is the third-largest U.S. telecommunications company. It offers savvisdirect, public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), following its acquisition of Savvis in 2011. CenturyLink first entered the PaaS market with the acquisition of AppFog in June 2013, followed by its acquisition of Tier 3 in November 2013.CenturyLink Cloud (formerly Tier 3) offers an IaaS platform (its core business) and WebFabric, a cloud application platform offering based on the open-source Cloud Foundry v.1 software extended to support .NET (Iron Foundry). WebFabric is the vendor's high-control, cloud-based aPaaS that is available only in isolated-tenancy mode (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"). This architecture provides dedicated execution space to tenants, but features minimal resource sharing or elasticity. AppFog, acquired earlier, is also based on Cloud Foundry v.1 software, but without the .NET extension. The two platforms share some code fundamentals, but will require a significant engineering effort to advance to the current version of Cloud Foundry, and to be combined into an integrated service. Prior to their acquisitions, both Tier 3 and AppFog had modest aPaaS market shares and name recognition.Strengths

The design of the WebFabric cloud platform technology, integrated with the established and innovative Tier 3 IaaS network, provides a potential for differentiating custom optimizations.

Support of .NET applications in the public PaaS environment is relatively rare and differentiates WebFabric from most competitors — even more so, considering that multiple other language environments can be colocated on the same IaaS foundation.

The acquisition of Tier 3 by CenturyLink will provide additional capital and new sales channels, increasing the potential of the vendor to market and sell its PaaS software and services.Cautions

Although WebFabric takes PaaS-style responsibility for management and versioning of the middleware technology, the tenants are not running in a shared environment; each tenant deployment is separate, and requires its own dedicated management and resource allocation. While such dedicated architecture may be attractive to some customers, its high costs and limited agility are not competitive in the general PaaS market and will stifle the vendor's ability to grow as a PaaS provider.

While Tier 3 is established as an innovator in the IaaS market, WebFabric has yet to carve out a dependable market share or name recognition in the crowded field of aPaaS vendors. The upsell from IaaS alone may prove insufficient to generate strong market adoption. The lack of an ecosystem of SaaS independent software vendor (ISV) partners is the further obstacle the vendor will have to overcome.

A lack of model-driven development productivity tools or plans for PaaS functionality aimed at enterprise application projects, including application integration, business process management (BPM), event processing and big data management, will compel many mainstream enterprises to look elsewhere.

The acquisition by CenturyLink will present a challenge of reconciliation and integration of WebFabric and AppFog, two aPaaS offerings, both of which had limited enterprise application platform market share on their own. Some discontinuities in the WebFabric road map are a likely side effect of this effort.

CloudBeesCloudBees is a U.S.-based provider of cloud services formed in 2010 by alumni of Red Hat JBoss, dedicated to the open-source software process and business model. The vendor delivers three major PaaS offerings: DEV@cloud — a development, continuous integration, test and life cycle management platform (application development life cycle management [ADLM] PaaS); RUN@cloud — a shared-OS, cloud-based high-control aPaaS; and WEAVE@cloud — an integration service (using the technology of the recently acquired FoxWeave, an integration PaaS [iPaaS]). The services can be provisioned in a shared or dedicated mode. In addition, the vendor manages a cloud-based relational database management system (DBMS), based on MySQL, for use with its application life cycle and runtime deployment PaaS. CloudBees offers no aPaaS software for deployment on-premises; however, there are multiple on-premises offerings of the same open-source platform technology available from third parties. DEV@cloud has a managed on-premises option and an Eclipse toolkit plug-in.Strengths

A comprehensive application life cycle management service, including development, test, staging, deployment, monitoring, version control and continuous integration, positions CloudBees ahead of most cloud competitors in completeness of support for high-control software projects.

The vendor has a strong commitment to openness, including the broad use of open-source software; support of multiple target application server containers beyond its own RUN@cloud (including Tomcat, JBoss and GlassFish); multiple languages, including Java, Node.js, and JVM languages like Clojure and Erlang; multiple frameworks, including Spring; the ability to be deployed on a variety of IaaS platforms; and the ability to deploy developed applications on competitors' platforms, including Google App Engine, Heroku and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk. This commitment supports strong portability and brings to a minimum the degree of vendor lock-in for CloudBees' customers. The vendor continues to expand its list of supported languages, platforms, frameworks and target execution environments.

Addition of integration services (iPaaS) via the recent acquisition of FoxWeave deepens the potential relationship of CloudBees with its customers, as most newly deployed cloud application services must be integrated with the processes and data of other cloud and on-premises applications. Planned support of the mobile back-end services will further increase the vendor's addressable market and will protect its competitiveness.

The fast-growing base of an estimated 500 paying production customers, and a good ecosystem of technology and business service partners, is a good foundation for growth in the new and still emerging aPaaS market.Cautions

Dependence on partners for support of such fundamental modern capabilities as native mobile application design or event stream processing to support an Internet-of-Things-style of applications may cause some leading-edge application projects to look elsewhere.

Support for only the relational data model, with dependence on partners for multimodel big data processing, parallelization, in-memory computing and business analytics, can make the platform insufficient for some advanced enterprise application projects.

No high-productivity option limits the offering to only systematic IT software projects, keeping CloudBees away from the large proportion of cloud platform use by citizen developers in line of business (LOB) organizations.

CloudBees must face IT industry megavendors that are encroaching on the Java aPaaS space with a limited ability to invest in marketing and direct sales, and a lack of support of the full Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) function set.cloudControlA German company, cloudControl provides an eponymous European-centric, cloud-based, high-control, shared-OS application PaaS, deployed on Amazon data centers located in EMEA. It also offers cloud-enabled application platform (CEAP) software, called Application Lifecycle Engine. The vendor offers services or managed private PaaS software to enterprise IT organizations, but focuses particular attention on supporting other PaaS and potentially SaaS service providers through its white-label-managed PaaS partnerships. Managed PaaS is cloudControl's software that is deployed in the data

centers of the customer's choice, but is managed by the vendor while the customer presents the services to its customers, fully customized to their brands.Strengths

The vendor has a well-established European customer base, claiming over 400 paying customers across service subscribers, software licensees and white-label-managed service providers. This establishes a good starting position for cloudControl to expand into new geographies and to build up its support of hybrid cloud deployments.

Support of buildpack specifications enables the cloudControl, its partners and its customers to extend the platform with new language engines, frameworks, databases and other software services available from other buildpack-supporting vendors, including salesforce.com's Heroku, IBM's future BlueMix, Pivotal, ActiveState, CenturyLink and others. Many of these buildpacks are open source.

The vendor's white-label-managed service partnerships with telecommunications companies and others set it apart from many other aPaaS providers, with a potential avenue of growth.Cautions

cloudControl's exclusive presence in European markets limits its brand recognition and ability to compete elsewhere, including in the important North American markets. Its white-label approach further "hides" the company's brand from its potential market.

A dependence on partners for advanced capabilities such as big data management and analytics, native mobile computing, and social collaboration makes cloudControl's market position vulnerable to better-equipped competitors.

The absence of an ecosystem of SaaS partners utilizing cloudControl's platform can be a significant competitive handicap, considering that extension and customization of SaaS are the primary drivers for adoption of PaaS by mainstream enterprise IT organizations.

Without services for fundamentals of enterprise computing such as application integration, BPM and event processing, cloudControl adoption will be limited to mostly relatively simple and isolated enterprise cloud computing initiatives.DockerDocker (formerly dotCloud) is a U.S.-based company with a multilingual, cloud-based, shared-OS, high-control aPaaS offering (called dotCloud Platform) deployed across North America and Europe. In 2013, the vendor released its open-source Docker.io software, which facilitates isolation of application or platform instances through deployment of software in OS containers. It is a foundation of the dotCloud Platform service. Red Hat and many other vendors are in the process of adopting Docker.io code as a standard part of their offerings and as an improved alternative to the standard Linux containers (LXC) technology. Docker continues to offer and support its aPaaS, but nearly all of the vendor's strategic focus has shifted to support the Docker.io open-source project. Docker.io is an optimizing extension to an IaaS service or a cloud management platform, but is only an underlying feature in the scope of aPaaS and especially enterprise-oriented aPaaS. The vendor's nearly undivided focus on Docker.io capitalizes on its growing popularity, but distracts it from the enterprise aPaaS market that is evaluated in this Magic Quadrant.Strengths

The dotCloud Platform supports a wide range of languages, frameworks, DBMSs and other composable services, including Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, Rails, Grails, Django, Node.js, mongoDB, MySQL, Redis and PostgreSQL. This openness appeals to many developers looking for a polyglot development environment, especially when open-source-based services are preferred.

Rapid and broad adoption of Docker.io by some leading software infrastructure companies helps the vendor build name recognition and its brand, potentially differentiating this relatively new company from many of its competitors.

A relatively large installed base of aPaaS subscribers (Docker claims over 500 paying organizations) creates a foundation for further growth and the upselling of additional services in the future.Cautions

An almost exclusive focus on Docker.io distracts the vendor from developing other sources of differentiation in the enterprise aPaaS market. Although Docker.io software is the foundational part of the dotCloud Platform, the vendor may find it difficult to differentiate in the aPaaS market on just that basis

alone, especially considering that most of its competitors are incorporating the open-source Docker.io or similar alternatives.

Docker's business plan to monetize its success with Docker.io by selling support and services to its users may be difficult to materialize considering the technology is adopted by software vendors, many of which will likely rely on self-support, unlike enterprise IT organizations, which are typically interested in buying support for all their software dependencies.

The dotCloud Platform is designed for technically advanced users, including enabled external access to IP ports, assumption of stateless design of services, lack of high-productivity tools and command line self-service. At the same time, some important enterprise capabilities (such as integration, API management, flow management and native mobile client development) are not on the product road map. Docker's aPaaS product road map will likely not meet the requirements of many enterprise prospects.

With only the minimal user base or name recognition for its aPaaS offering in a mainstream enterprise computing context, the vendor faces the challenge of proving its ability to support mainstream enterprise workloads or attracting enterprise-oriented SaaS ISVs. As long as Docker's focus is outside the aPaaS market, it is unlikely to deliver this proof.Engine YardEngine Yard specializes in dedicated cloud-based deployment for Ruby on Rails applications. In addition to its flagship Ruby offering, Engine Yard also supports PHP, Node.js and Java. Engine Yard's offering is a cloud-based, shared-hardware, high-control aPaaS that uses a dedicated environment for each tenant, and its underlying infrastructure uses a shared-hardware model of multitenancy (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"). It offers a manual or scheduled scaling capability, but no autoscaling. The vendor provides a managed and curated infrastructure stack with a configurable composition that allows the user to choose automation (PaaS style) versus control (IaaS+ style). It runs on several public IaaS offerings (including AWS and Azure), as well as in the more managed environments of enterprise-focused providers, including Verizon Terremark. Engine Yard users commonly refer to it as a hosting solution; although it runs on IaaS and has some PaaS capabilities, its origin predates the PaaS architecture. It is best thought of as a self-service, high-touch, flexible, focused environment, optimized for the deployment and management of a dedicated Ruby on Rails platform (which is what most of the vendor's customers run).Strengths

Engine Yard's Ruby knowledge and focus make it an excellent choice for those looking for a dedicated virtual machine (VM)-based Ruby environment.

Engine Yard's support and reliability are cited as strengths by its customers. The vendor's tenant environments have been shown to scale well, and its underlying infrastructure can

be extensively customized, which allows for advanced technical control for customers that want it. A relatively large installed base and high revenue in the emerging aPaaS market indicate that Engine

Yard has found its market.Cautions

Engine Yard has limited cloud capabilities, particularly in elasticity and sharing. Its shared-hardware model and lack of autoscaling mean it is best-suited for environments that benefit most from manual and preplanned approaches to changing capacity.

The entry price for using Engine Yard services has not been small. Recent free trials and more competitive entry pricing are aimed at alleviating this issue, but may put pressure on the vendor's revenue in the short term.

Engine Yard is not primarily focused on alleviating subscribers' responsibilities for managing the system infrastructure and cloudiness (the core value proposition and abstraction of PaaS). Although the abstraction level provided does qualify as PaaS, much of the design and use case for Engine Yard are close to what Gartner calls "IaaS+."

Engine Yard does not provide its own integration, BPM, big data and analytics capabilities, nor does it offer a model-driven, high-productivity cloud platform environment. Those looking for an application platform for LOB levels of productivity or advanced enterprise projects will be compelled to look elsewhere.Google

Google offers its App Engine application PaaS as part of its Cloud Platform. App Engine is a shared-OS, cloud-native, high-control aPaaS. It is available in separate renditions for Java, Python, Go and, most recently, PHP. Other components of Google Cloud Platform include Compute Engine (a colocated IaaS offering); Cloud SQL (relational database PaaS [dbPaaS] using the open-source MySQL software); NoSQL Cloud Datastore (a cloud storage file system); Cloud Endpoints API generator and BigQuery (for some big data analytics).Strengths

Google's large installed base (it claims 30,000 paying customers) consists of many small Web innovators and some very large Web business sites (such as Snapchat and Khan Academy). The vendor also claims that over 90% of its internal IT is run on App Engine. The practice of the internal use of App Engine, as well as the App Engine experience of supporting the high number of isolated tenants, sets the stage for Google's enterprise campaign.

Google's outstanding reputation as a cloud services provider and an early big data innovator lends credibility to Google App Engine and other PaaS offerings for projects that require high elastic scaling, the processing of large amounts of unstructured data and some forms of business analytics.

Some of Google's recently added enterprise capabilities (including 99.95% availability SLAs, enterprise-level support, a relational database, unintrusive version control, minimal planned downtime, autoscaling, a basic in-memory data grid service, and project life cycle management using Apache Maven and Spring framework programming for the Java version of App Engine) mitigate the long-standing obstacles to enterprise adoption of Google's application PaaS.

API-level integration with Google Apps enables the vendor to offer its PaaS capabilities as an upsell to enterprises adopting Google Apps and looking for new ways to extend them using advanced programming. The combined selling of Google Apps (SaaS) and Google Cloud Platform (IaaS and PaaS) is a promising business opportunity.Cautions

Google's limited reputation as an enterprise service provider, in general, and its minimal presence as an enterprise PaaS provider, in particular, have created a perception of Google as a consumer-only vendor. To succeed as an enterprise PaaS provider, Google must overcome this perception.

A strategic focus on cloud services and an absence of on-premises versions of Google software prevent Google from being considered by many mainstream enterprises looking for a hybrid public/private PaaS environment, especially in the early stages of their adoption of the cloud platform model. The few independent attempts at porting App Engine to on-premises (for example, Red Hat CapeDwarf and AppScale) can't alone deliver the viability and functional breadth to match Google cloud services.

Google's early focus on independent Web innovators prevented it from recognizing some of the essential functional requirements of an enterprise-class application platform. Absence of support for application integration, BPM, event processing (although queuing is supported) or legacy migration limits the scope of mainstream enterprise application projects where Google can win business.

A lack of application ISV partners and a modest number of technology ISV partners isolate the vendor's offering and limit its ability to address vertical, geographic and other targeted business cases.IBMIBM PaaS strategy is currently implemented by the IBM SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) offering, available since early 2013. SCAS includes the IBM Web Application Pattern (using the Liberty profile version of the on-premises WebSphere Application Server technology); the IBM Mobile Application Platform Pattern (using IBM Worklight software for mobile application development, deployment and management); support for PHP based on Zend's technology, a message-oriented middleware service (based on WebSphere MQ); DBMS services (based on IBM DB2 UDB technology); application life cycle management services (based on IBM Rational technology); and additional, minor services. IBM's PaaS offering also includes the WebSphere Cast Iron Live integration PaaS, which is not technically or commercially framed in the SCAS offering.To support elastic scaling, SCAS leverages the same pattern technology used by the IBM Workload Deployer private PaaS-enabling appliance and the IBM PureApplication "PaaS in a box" integrated system products. SCAS was originally deployed on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise IaaS platform, but now IBM plans to offer it from the recently acquired SoftLayer infrastructure services.

In June 2013, IBM released the technical preview of the next generation of its PaaS strategy based on the offering called BlueMix, which is based on the open-source Cloud Foundry and OpenStack technologies. While SCAS Web Application Pattern deploys as a cloud-based high-control shared-OS aPaaS, BlueMix will inherit from Cloud Foundry the more agile shared-OS model of elasticity (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy").Strengths

IBM's large and loyal installed base, ample partner network, and the popularity and credibility of its on-premises application infrastructure offerings — coupled with its strong professional services and outsourcing businesses — provide the vendor with plenty of opportunities and channels to cross-sell its aPaaS offerings.

The rich set of capabilities provided by SCAS, and the compatibility with its popular WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, DB2 UDB and Rational products, makes the IBM PaaS an attractive option for IBM clients and partners wanting to move established applications into a public cloud environment.

The full compatibility of the pattern technology between SCAS, IBM Workload Deployer (IWD) and IBM PureApplication provides user organizations and ISVs with a compatible and integrated application platform to support public, private and hybrid cloud scenarios.

BlueMix will be based on a "mobile first" approach and will target what IBM qualifies as "system of engagement" (front-end) types of applications by providing support for mobile application development, Java EE (limited to the Web profile), Ruby, Node.js, a variety of open-source DBMSs, AMQP, in-memory data management, big data support, analytics, DevOps support, and rich monitoring, management and tracking capabilities. These characteristics and the extensive use of open-source technology will make the BlueMix-derived PaaS attractive for a wide range of user organizations outside of IBM's traditional large enterprise customer base.Cautions

The installed base of IBM SCAS is estimated to be fewer than 50 clients worldwide, thus reflecting the limited sales resources deployed by IBM to promote and sell its PaaS offering, at least until the vendor recently announced expansion of sales support for the offering.

The marketing programs implemented so far by IBM don't seem to be in line with the investment required to support a strategic PaaS offering. SCAS visibility in the market is very low, even among the most loyal IBM clients and partners, which is an obvious obstacle to more widespread adoption of the offering.

IBM hinted that the BlueMix-derived PaaS offering (expected to be generally available sometime in 2014) will complement SCAS, but also that the two offerings will merge. However, the vendor has not yet provided any details as to how and when this will take place. The resulting uncertainty about the evolution of the SCAS road map may confuse user organizations and partners, and may cast doubt about the future of the current offering.

Users testified to SCAS's full compatibility with the corresponding on-premises platforms, but given the small installed base, its suitability for large and business-critical deployments is not fully proven. Prospects should run extensive tests and proofs of concept (POCs) to make sure the platform can address their requirements.Indra gnubilaIndra gnubila is the software and cloud services business unit of Indra, a large Spanish system integrator operating in about 140 countries, deriving from the acquisition of gnubila, a small Spanish company. The vendor's G application platform is available as an on-premises, cloud-enabled software product (via both open-source license and as a supported product), and in the form of a high-control, cloud-native, shared-everything aPaaS (a rare combination of characteristics).The G platform supports Java EE, .NET, Ruby, PHP and Perl containers, and provides additional capabilities atop the core application server platform, including mobile app support; a graph-oriented, in-memory multitenant DBMS (Gdb); big data capabilities; a form manager; human workflow, document management; reporting and data integration features.The aPaaS rendition of the G technology is available on top of AWS, IBM SmartCloud, Microsoft Azure and Indra's FlexIT IaaS platforms.

Strengths Indra gnubila's technology reflects the vendor's outstanding insight in cloudiness — its aPaaS is one of a

few cloud application platforms that are both cloud-native (the containers for processing and the database are elastic and multitenant) and high control (supporting third-generation language [3GL] programming for advanced system development or migration of existing applications to the cloud). Most of the vendor's cloud-native competitors are proprietary, and most of its high-control competitors are cloud-based and use relatively coarse shared-OS or shared-hardware elasticity (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy").

Indra gnubila's aPaaS provides an advanced and rich set of application platform capabilities, fully compatible with the on-premises version of the technology, which enables user organizations to address a wide variety of use cases on top of a shared-everything, elastically scalable cloud infrastructure supporting a variety of enterprise-class, high-availability disaster recovery, monitoring, security and SLA arrangements.

The vendor's aPaaS provides extensive features to support third-party ISVs willing to develop, deploy and sell SaaS applications on top of it, such as compatibility with Java EE and .NET, fast application cloning, an ample set of DevOps APIs, an application marketplace, flexible billing module, and integration with a variety of payment gateways. These features have been leveraged by other Indra business units to cloud-enable their software products and make the platform attractive to ISVs moving toward a SaaS model.

Availability of the platform on a variety of IaaS platforms, planned to be further extended over the next 12 months, in addition to compatibility with the on-premises version, allows maximum deployment flexibility for user organizations and opens partnership opportunities for gnubila.Cautions

Indra gnubila's installed base amounts to approximately 100 clients, mostly in Spain. Although the business unit has almost doubled its aPaaS clients during the past 12 months, the potential sales synergy with Indra has not fully manifested outside of Spain. Therefore, gnubila's still limited ability to address international markets makes the platform scarcely appealing for global organizations.

Despite being in the market for almost 10 years (under different ownerships), the gnubila platform suffers from a limited market awareness, including in its own home country. Although the acquisition by Indra potentially provides gnubila with the resources needed to improve its marketing plans, this potential has still to unfold.

Indra gnubila's users mention the platform look and feel and reporting features as areas in need of improvement. Technical support delivered from Colombia (where the platform is largely developed) may prove challenging for clients based in other time zones. While Indra's global support gears up, these issues may alienate the interest of prospects looking for advanced user interactions, and may be an obstacle for the implementation of projects with an international scale.

The offering's road map doesn't include support for some important emerging technology trends, such as complex-event processing and API management.MendixMendix is a small, but well-established, provider of the Mendix App Platform, a high-productivity, shared-OS multitenant cloud application development and deployment platform. The Mendix App Platform includes a development environment, the Mendix Business Modeler, that can be used as a cloud service or downloaded to the developer's computer (in either case, application metadata is stored in a cloud-resident repository). The Mendix App Platform is available as a private hosted offering or as a public aPaaS.Strengths

Mendix was among the first vendors to establish itself in the high-productivity aPaaS market. The vendor has proven capabilities as a model-driven, high-productivity platform. It offers a mature and

comprehensive "no code" development capability that allows the delivery of highly capable applications without writing 3GL code.

Mendix offers subtenancy support that allows ISVs to use Mendix App Platform as the foundation for the SaaS services that they build.

The Mendix application development software has mature support for the integration required to deliver composite applications and to synchronize data among several systems.Cautions

The current Mendix aPaaS architecture is based on shared-OS multitenancy, built on Linux containers. This approach represents one of the easier paths to multitenancy, but it doesn't offer the same level of resource sharing that is available to cloud-native aPaaS providers, which consequently enjoy lower infrastructure costs that can be passed on to customers as lower prices.

The Mendix approach to elasticity is not as automatic as some of the other aPaaS offerings, meaning that operators must attend to usage metrics on an ongoing basis for applications that may encounter spikes in use.

While Mendix has an established aPaaS business, it is still a small player in this market and will face increasing challenges as the large infrastructure software vendors like IBM, Software AG, Microsoft and Tibco ratchet up their aPaaS efforts.MicrosoftMicrosoft's offering, Windows Azure, has evolved into an environment that supports IaaS and PaaS models. As a result of adding full IaaS capabilities, as well as fleshing out its private cloud strategy, the vendor now provides the onramps that are making PaaS much more approachable for enterprises.The vendor's approach is to focus on a "cloud first" push toward frequent updates and an aggressive approach to features and enhancements. Its long-term goal is to deliver the full range of .NET application infrastructure capabilities as Azure PaaS services. Its PaaS capabilities go beyond aPaaS and include its SQL Database (dbPaaS) as well as messaging middleware services (Windows Azure Service Bus), in-memory data grid services (Windows Azure Cache) and iPaaS (Windows Azure BizTalk Services). It has also recently added Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud mobile back-end service offering that supports multiple clients beyond its own mobile client strategy. Its presence in other cloud environments (for example, SaaS through Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365, including SharePoint Online) also contributes to the vendor's broad cloud strategy.Windows Azure combines IaaS and PaaS capabilities in a common, colocated suite of services. Windows Azure Cloud Services is Microsoft's cloud-based, high-control, shared-hardware aPaaS offering. The more recent Windows Azure Web Sites is a separately standing shared-OS aPaaS intended for relatively simple Web-facing applications.Strengths

Windows developers and those familiar with .NET languages and constructs find Azure a comfortable, compatible environment to work in. This brings opportunities for millions of developers and is a natural target for established Windows ISVs.

The focus on mirroring capabilities and private cloud (Microsoft Cloud OS) means that enterprises can use Azure knowing that it integrates well with their existing environments and that they may have the option, in some cases, to run their applications in-house or on Azure.

Microsoft's vision is comprehensive, including support for integration BPM, in-memory computing, messaging and other functionality offered as cloud services in conjunction with its core aPaaS. Additionally, Azure's services include the fast-growing IaaS and PaaS, allowing developers to use the right level of abstraction and to use both simultaneously in the same project.

Azure supports Node.js, Java, PHP, Python and other environments besides .NET (including Linux in IaaS), enabling developers with backgrounds other than pure Microsoft to join the Azure environment in an attempt to broaden its addressable market.Cautions

Microsoft's offerings lack model-driven, graphics-based high-productivity development support (Visual Studio productivity tools notwithstanding). Its xRM capabilities (part of Dynamics CRM) have the potential to be utilized in conjunction with Windows Azure, but the vendor does not actively promote it.

Microsoft is facing uncertainty due to company leadership issues and regarding its core desktop and Office businesses that may cause distractions. Spreading its efforts across a wide range of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings dilutes focus.

The goal of mirroring capabilities across Azure and Windows Server is a work in progress, and marketing promises are ahead of current product realities.

MIOsoftMIOsoft MIOedge is a shared-OS, cloud-native, high-productivity application PaaS. The vendor also offers MIOceap, a cloud-enabled application platform (using MIOedge software) that is deployed privately in the data center of the customer's choice, but is managed by MIOsoft. It also includes MIOhub, a multifaceted big data store using Apache Hadoop combined with MIOdb (including a workflow server) and a NoSQL context database, extended with data integration and analytics tools. MIOhub's contextual analytics platform also is available as a cloud service or as software for private deployment.Strengths

Strategic investment in big data management (offering variety through support of multiple data formats, models and sources; velocity through support of sensor and other event streams; and volume through the ability to absorb petabytes of incoming data), data integration and context-aware analytics, including support for parallel processing and in-memory computing, differentiates the vendor from most aPaaS competitors. Its vision for transactional context-aware enterprise computing is market-leading.

High-productivity development tools feature easy-to-learn-and-use graphical design of business applications and business analytics, producing high-performance, parallelized and in-memory transactional/analytical cloud-native applications with Web or mobile user interfaces. Application designers need not be experts in advanced cloud computing architecture to create advanced cloud computing applications.

Support of integrated public, managed private and virtual private delivery of the platform enables IT organizations to build hybrid and distributed applications. Customers choose locations for the data, the degree of its distribution, and the degree of control over different segments of their business data and data processing.

Several hundred paying enterprise customers (although not all using the public cloud version of the suite); the use of MIOsoft-controlled colocated data centers in multiple geographical locations, in addition to support of multiple public IaaS platforms; the focus on ISVs and on building a SaaS ecosystem; and a 99.9% availability SLA are strong indications of the vendor's commitment to meeting demanding enterprise computing requirements.Cautions

A focus on advanced NoSQL/Hadoop analytical data models makes the platform less suitable for simple transactional applications using a basic relational data model (although the platform supports the more advanced combined transactional and analytical processing in MIOdb).

Minimal name recognition reflects the limited ability of the vendor to market and reach its addressable market. It also keeps MIOsoft off many longlists and denies it many opportunities to compete. Many paying customers use MIOsoft technology on-premises, further reducing its exposure as a cloud services provider.

The proprietary encoding of business logic (graphics and proprietary scripting language) translates to a vendor lock-in and can prevent adoption by some mainstream IT organizations. Although Java and JavaScript programming are supported and the UML standard is used in application modeling, the overall productivity tooling and execution framework remain proprietary.NTT CommunicationsNTT Communications is a large, well-recognized, proven global sourcing and carrier service provider with headquarters in Tokyo and many regional offices globally. NTT Communications Cloudn PaaS is a high-control aPaaS. It is based on a cloud-based shared-OS PaaS architecture. The service leverages Pivotal Cloud Foundry and has cloud characteristics added. The vendor introduced Cloudn PaaS in April 2013 and acquired approximately 500 customers during the service's first six months of availability.Strengths

Cloudn PaaS supports multiple application server containers (Tomcat 6 and Resin) and multiple languages (including Java, Node.js, Ruby and multiple frameworks [Spring, Play]), and it provides a Cloud Foundry Eclipse plug-in for development. Its open-source-software-based openness provides portability, minimizes vendor lock-in and strongly promotes the open PaaS movement by itself.

Cloudn PaaS offers a broad set of services with AWS-compatible APIs (for example, autoscaling, monitoring, provisioning and multiple kinds of compute services). This enables a high-control aPaaS environment to provide a platform for development with high-productivity features.

Cloudn PaaS runs in Japanese data centers owned and operated by NTT Communications with high availability (i.e., an SLA of 99.99%) and proven customer satisfaction. In the next 12 months, Cloudn PaaS will be available in more regions, such as the U.S. and the Asia/Pacific region.

Over the next 12 months, NTT Communications plans to provide Enterprise Cloud PaaS for the virtual private cloud, which shares the same technology as the enabling technology of CloudnPaaS. This will enable a hybrid PaaS with bidirectional application portability between Cloudn PaaS and Enterprise Cloud PaaS.Cautions

As of November 2013, NTT Communications sells its aPaaS offering to Japanese companies only. Although it plans to expand its business into the U.S., Asia/Pacific region and EMEA during the next 12 months, its go-to-market strategy to reach the global market is still under development, and its current offering may be less attractive against the leading players in those regions.

NTT Communications is at a stage of developing its influence in the application infrastructure market such that, in order to attract enterprise customers, it needs to form much broader partner ecosystems.

Cloud Foundry, the software technology for Cloudn PaaS, is at a phase of developing its presence and influence in demanding enterprise users (especially, in Japan) such that it needs to prove its capability by increasing its track record to develop and run new mission-critical applications in production.

To broaden its appeal to more advanced and competitive enterprise software projects, NTT Communications Cloudn PaaS needs to expand support for a broader set of application server containers, advanced technologies (such as in-memory data grid [IMDG] or complex-event processing [CEP]) and/or growing requirements (for example, big data analytics, mobile, social computing and machine-to-machine [M2M]).ProgressIn June 2013, Progress acquired Rollbase, an established, high-productivity, cloud-native shared-container aPaaS. At the time of the Rollbase acquisition, Progress announced Progress Pacific, a vision for a comprehensive, multifunctional set of PaaS offerings that, when completed, will combine Rollbase with other Progress technologies, including Corticon (for business rule processing), a retained copy of Savvion's BPM software (when Progress sold Savvion, it retained rights to a then-current copy of the Savvion BPM software), DataDirect Cloud (for access to and integration with multiple legacy data sources, as well as relational DBMSs, big data stores, social sites and cloud data services) and OpenEdge (an on-premises fourth-generation [4GL] that has been used extensively by ISVs to create packaged applications).Strengths

To best enable ISV customers, Progress Pacific offers a shared-everything multitenancy model that natively supports subtenancy. In other words, Pacific provides multitenancy for multiple developers. Then, each of these developers can build applications and make those applications available to their own customers (each of which can have multiple users).

Progress has a well-established ISV business with its OpenEdge product. With the ability to leverage this customer base, as well as the ability to leverage the vendor's demonstrated knowledge regarding how to sell and market to ISVs, it has an advantage over most competitors in the aPaaS market. Since one of the keys to vendor success in the aPaaS market will be the ability of Progress to encourage the development of SaaS offerings on top of its aPaaS, this is a notable point of leverage for Progress.

With Progress' several established on-premises software businesses, Progress Pacific can leverage mature capabilities in several important application development areas (for example, business rule processing and BPM, as well as data access to legacy and social data sources).

The core of Pacific is mature in that Rollbase was founded in 2007. Also, Rollbase can port some Force.com applications away from salesforce.com's aPaaS, helping users avoid being locked in to salesforce.com. On the road map for Progress Pacific is the ability for developers to write code in JavaScript (the extension language in Rollbase), ABL (the fourth-generation proprietary OpenEdge language), basic Java or other languages, and then run those applications on-premises as well as in the cloud.

Cautions Although it has had long-standing success with selling to ISVs and their midmarket customers, Progress

has had less success selling to large end-user enterprises. Success with aPaaS will require skills in both ends of the market.

The integration of the Rollbase, OpenEdge, Corticon, DataDirect and Savvion codebases is a challenging undertaking. While Progress has completed part of this effort, the considerable R&D effort required may, at least temporarily, lower the vendor's investment in some other areas, such as sales and marketing.

A recent major reorganization, along with a sell-off of previously acquired application integration and other middleware assets, creates a sense of uncertainty concerning the vendor's ability to execute on its strategy, which must be overcome.Red HatRed Hat is a leading provider of the open-source Linux OS technology (Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL]) and the open-source JBoss family of middleware products. The vendor has utilized these to enter the aPaaS market with its high-control, cloud-based, shared-OS OpenShift Online offering, and also offers an on-premises CEAP called OpenShift Enterprise, which can be used by IT organizations to create a private PaaS environment. Red Hat leverages its expertise in Linux, Java and security to make its offerings attractive to enterprises. It features a cartridge mechanism for supporting many interchangeable plug-in middleware environments and languages. Currently, most Red Hat OpenShift usage is as a CEAP, but its aPaaS offering is gaining customers.Strengths

Red Hat's open-source, Linux and Java history and expertise make it a good choice for those looking for familiar Java programming for cloud computing.

The comprehensive suite of middleware offerings on-premises (including integration, BPM, portal, rule management, event processing, in-memory computing and others) creates the basis for a comprehensive multifunctional PaaS offering over time.

OpenShift Enterprise and OpenShift Online use the same codebase, and offer the flexibility and choice to deploy in the cloud and in the enterprise's data center.

Red Hat has been working quietly with Google on the CapeDwarf project, which aims to bridge the gap between Google's cloud-native App Engine and Red Hat's enterprise-native JBoss/OpenShift worlds.Cautions

A lack of model-driven high-productivity tools for OpenShift aPaaS will compel the many prospects (including LOB) that choose cloud services over on-premises software, and expect faster results and ease of use, to look elsewhere.

Reliance on partners for mobile, device event streaming, and big data management and analytics means that enterprises looking for advanced strategic offerings from their PaaS provider will look elsewhere today.

Despite more than two years of pre-general-availability, OpenShift Online by Red Hat is new as a generally available offering and there are currently few paying customers. Red Hat's viability as a cloud services provider is not yet well-established.salesforce.comSalesforce.com is a cloud computing pioneer offering a market-leading SaaS since 1999 and a market-leading PaaS since 2007. The vendor's flagship aPaaS offering has been and remains Force.com, a cloud-native, high-productivity, shared-everything cloud platform service. Recently, salesforce.com announced Salesforce1 Platform, which joins Force.com with Heroku1 and a collection of other platform-related capabilities. Force.com is built around a proprietary, high-scale, cloud-native relational DBMS, available also as the Database.com service (dbPaaS). This is the same database that underlies salesforce.com applications.The vendor also offers Heroku that is a separately standing, multilingual, shared-OS, cloud-based, high-control aPaaS offering. Heroku was acquired by salesforce.com in 2010 and runs on an AWS network of data centers supporting multiple open-source languages and frameworks. The new Heroku1 includes a data synchronization bridge (utilizing technology of the just-acquired cloudconnect). It automates access by Heroku-based applications to the massive (though still remote) salesforce.com SaaS and PaaS databases. The Force.com command line interface (CLI), for the first time, enables developers to interact

with both Force.com and Heroku environments via an integrated CLI. The basic Heroku platform, as well as Force.com and Database.com, remain available apart from the new Salesforce1 and Heroku1 suites of services.Other notable components of Salesforce1 Platform include AppExchange (an app store listing native Force.com, Heroku and interconnected external applications); Communities and Chatter (a social computing capability); Identity (for security and single-sign-on support); and development tools, SDKs and API libraries for mobile, Web and service-oriented application development. Everything salesforce.com offers is available exclusively as a cloud service. There is no deployable software version of Salesforce1 Platform or any of its components.Strengths

The vendor is by far the largest provider in the enterprise aPaaS market, with fast-growing revenue and a fast-growing user base and application count, combined with the longest strategic and successful presence in the cloud application and platform markets. This gives salesforce.com the name recognition and reputation that, for many prospects, translate to a safe choice in the otherwise immature and unsettled PaaS market.

Continuing innovation over the years produced the offering with a broad portfolio of capabilities to create applications that are mobile, social and highly scalable, with identity management, flow control and portal capabilities. The platform is open for interoperability via multiple classes of APIs, including REST, SOAP, streaming and batch. With the planned support for device streams, some big data analytics and the expansion of the mobile application architecture and identity management, salesforce.com is ahead of most of its competitors in tracking the leading industry trends.

Dedicated support for ISVs in Salesforce1 Platform and in the vendor's business model recognizes the critical importance of the ecosystem of partners to the success of a platform offering, and helps salesforce.com broaden the channels and market presence for its platform.

Market-leading success of salesforce.com SaaS offerings creates a massive channel for the upselling of Salesforce1 Platform; for many projects building extensions around salesforce.com SaaS, use of Force.com is a natural choice, enabling the vendor to command premium prices and increase users' lock-in with its offerings.Cautions

The proprietary nature of the Force.com platform deters adoption by many independent application development projects seeking to avoid vendor lock-in and prevents application migration projects from utilizing the platform.

Minimal integration between Heroku and Force.com, beyond the levels available through public APIs, leaves the Heroku offering in the shadow of its "big brother" (Force.com), neither fully independent nor fully integrated. The new Heroku1 is aimed at mitigating this challenge, but the new technology implementing bidirectional synchronization between the open-source Heroku Postgres and proprietary Database.com is technically challenging and still has to be proven to be useful, dependable and manageable before it becomes an established solution.

The lack of an on-premises option leaves the many enterprise organizations looking for a portable hybrid cloud platform environment outside the vendor's addressable market.

The well-established identity of salesforce.com as a SaaS provider creates the perception of its platform offering as secondary, leading many advanced enterprise application projects to look elsewhere for a suitable technology and business partner. The Salesforce1 Platform initiative is aimed at addressing this issue. Changing or extending a brand identity is a difficult undertaking. Its success will require the aggressive marketing of supporting success stories and further technology investments.SAPThe SAP PaaS strategy is framed in the SAP Hana Cloud Platform offering, which includes an eponymous aPaaS; a portal PaaS (SAP Hana Cloud Portal); SAP Mobile Platform, Enterprise Edition, Cloud Version; an iPaaS (SAP Hana Cloud Integration); analytics capabilities (SAP Lumira Cloud); collaboration (SAP Jam); and an in-memory DBMS PaaS (SAP Hana One on AWS).The core aPaaS component of SAP Hana Cloud Platform is a high-control, cloud-based, shared-hardware cloud platform. It supports a Java container providing compatibility with the Java EE 6 Web Profile, relational DBMS (based on the open-source MaxDB technology), an in-memory DBMS (based on the SAP

Hana database) service, and a connectivity service to integrate point-to-point with back-end SAP and non-SAP on-premises applications.Strengths

Integrated support with the SAP Hana in-memory DBMS enables user organizations and ISVs to develop innovative applications that would be difficult or even impossible to implement using traditional techniques.

Support for popular open standards (such as Java EE); compatibility with SAP on-premises NetWeaver Java Application Server, which enables hybrid architectures; native integration with SAP communications protocols (via the connectivity service); and colocation (and embedded capabilities to enable integration) with SAP SaaS offerings make SAP Hana Cloud Platform an attractive proposition for user organizations and ISVs looking for an aPaaS to extend SAP application offerings on the basis of fully cloud-based or hybrid cloud/on-premises architectures.

The road map for SAP aPaaS includes support for server-side JavaScript and a rapid application development tool; a rich set of DevOps APIs; REST/OData API publishing and API management; the opening of the rich set of SAP Hana database capabilities (for example, predictive analytics and event processing) enabled by the server-side, high-productivity, platform-independent proprietary River Definition Language; elastic scaling; and improved security, high availability and disaster recovery. Once these capabilities are available, they will make the offering attractive for a larger number of use cases.

Positioning of SAP Hana Cloud Platform as the platform of choice for future SAP SaaS and other cloud services adds credibility to the offering and will likely attract investments from SAP's loyal partners.Cautions

SAP Hana Cloud Platform has fewer than 100 clients and, despite the positive experience reported by some users in terms of availability, ease of use and self-service, its viability as a platform for large-scale, enterprise-class or global-class deployments is still uncertain.

The vendor has identified SAP Hana Cloud Platform as a major marketing theme for 2014. However, the platform's visibility in the marketplace is still very low and, often, not even long-term, and loyal SAP clients are aware of it. The decision to use the Hana brand, although likely to pay off in the long run, may confuse prospects and potential partners, which still primarily associate the Hana tag only with SAP's in-memory database technology.

The development environment for SAP Hana Cloud Platform is an Eclipse-based, on-premises tool, but the on-premises testing environment doesn't include the SAP Hana database, which makes testing tricky for applications that use the SAP in-memory DBMS capability of SAP's aPaaS.

Support for cloud capabilities is still quite limited (for example, no autoscaling). This, coupled with the availability of the platform on only two data centers (in Europe and the U.S.), with more planned for the future, is an indication of a still maturing offering that may not be suitable to address global business-critical deployments.Software AGIn the aPaaS market, Software AG offers AgileApps Live, based on the recently acquired aPaaS technology and service of LongJump. AgileApps Live is a shared-everything, cloud-native, high-productivity application PaaS. The AgileApps technology is also available as software for private cloud and ISV use. AgileApps Live is part of the announced Software AG Live initiative (also referred to as "unified PaaS"). The vendor's strategic cloud initiative also includes the Process Live bpmPaaS and the future (in 2014) integration service (Integration Live iPaaS), using the company's well-established on-premises webMethods and Aris software, adapted and extended for the cloud. Finally, Software AG also offers the Portfolios Live application service, designed to manage enterprise software assets.Strengths

The vendor's high-productivity cloud platform is attractive to LOB developers and many IT projects. When combined with the forthcoming business process modeling and management and cloud services integration capabilities, Software AG is in a position to offer a multifunction enterprise cloud platform service for mainstream enterprise projects.

The combination of a long-standing aPaaS from the former LongJump (established in 2003) and the business and financial resources of Software AG (an enterprise software vendor since 1969) creates the potential for accelerated growth of the combined companies in the enterprise PaaS market.

Established market leadership in the application integration and BPM software markets (webMethods, Aris), and legacy high-productivity application platforms (Natural), gives Software AG cloud road map credibility in the application infrastructure and enterprise computing markets, which many of its PaaS competitors lack.

Availability of the platform as both service and software is the foundation for a hybrid private/public aPaaS, which is the preferred approach by many mainstream IT organizations in the early stages of adoption of PaaS.Cautions

A lack of experience in the cloud computing markets at the core of Software AG company leadership and the limited market success of LongJump may challenge the vendor's ability to market, sell and evolve its PaaS offerings, as well as the development of an effective business model for PaaS.

The lack of name recognition for Software AG or AgileApps in cloud computing (including PaaS) markets, combined with a minimal SaaS partner ecosystem, will be a challenge that Software AG will have to overcome while facing both enterprise and cloud megavendors either entering or already established in the PaaS market.

A focus on high productivity attracts certain projects and developers; however, without a high-control, backward-compatible alternative, the company will miss opportunities with advanced enterprise cloud computing projects, enterprise application migration projects, development/test engagements and IT organizations willing to forgo high productivity to avoid vendor lock-in.

The relatively conservative initial road map for the evolution of Software AG Live focused on cloud fundamentals first (development, integration, workflow management) and left the vendor, in the short term, without leading-edge capabilities for native mobile applications; management of volume and variety of big data; device and sensor event streams in support of Internet of Things; and business analytics, which have emerged as common demands of the advanced enterprise software initiatives. (Some support of the mobile user interface for AgileApps Live and an updated cloud services road map are expected in 2014.)WSO2WSO2 is a small, but established, open-source software vendor that delivers a comprehensive array of on-premises software for development, deployment and management of service-oriented architecture (SOA)-style applications (see "Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Platforms" and "Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites"). Based in California, and with development resources in Sri Lanka (the company's origin), WSO2 has created its PaaS offerings by packaging its on-premises products as "cartridges" for its innovative Stratos cloud management platform, an open- source cloud management platform. (WSO2 contributed Stratos to Apache as an open-source project.) The vendor's current cloud services include WSO2 App Cloud (a cloud-based, shared-OS, high-control aPaaS, which includes WSO2 App Factory, an application life cycle management platform), WSO2 Integration Cloud (iPaaS) and WSO2 API Cloud (a cloud API management service).Strengths

The vendor's PaaS architecture enables it to continue to deliver components of its comprehensive array of on-premises software as cloud services, including complex-event processing, BPM, business rule processing, identity management, mobile application development and data access services.

WSO2's PaaS architecture, with its plug-in cartridge model, can be used by the vendor's partners and customers to cloud-enable some other products (such as MySQL, Tomcat or PHP) by packaging them as Stratos cartridges.

WSO2 supports both multitenancy and subtenancy (where some subscribers of WSO2 services, such as SaaS ISVs, establish their own subscribers). This will enable WSO2 to eventually build an ecosystem of SaaS partners and to support some advanced enterprise IT use patterns.

WSO2 App Cloud delivers DevOps development/deployment capabilities as a cloud service, enabling streamlined application delivery in support of agile development processes. WSO2 App Cloud also provides an app store and social computing capabilities to enable and encourage collaboration among developers.

Cautions WSO2 Public Cloud was launched as an online preview in October 2013. WSO2's initial aPaaS entry,

WSO2 StratosLive, will be retired when WSO2 Public Cloud becomes generally available, planned for the end of 1Q14. The reintroduced WSO2 cloud services have yet to be proven with a substantial number of enterprise customers.

While WSO2 has had some success in establishing itself in the on-premises application infrastructure markets, it is still a small company with a limited physical presence in mostly second- and third-tier markets.

Although the vendor can point to months with 99.97% uptime, its uptime guarantee is only 95%, which is substantially lower than the SLA commitments of most of its competitors (although some make no commitment at all). This may dampen interest from prospects needing to deploy business-critical applications.

WSO2 Public Cloud does not contain all components required to support advanced enterprise application development, as it does not provide business activity monitoring, complex-event processing or support for big data management or analytics.

Vendors Added and DroppedWe review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.This is the inaugural edition of the Magic Quadrant for the enterprise aPaaS market, so no vendors have been added or dropped. We plan to refresh this research annually and, each time, will update the market definition, the inclusion and evaluation criteria, and the weights of the criteria to reflect current market conditions. As the result, some vendors that are featured in this research may no longer qualify, and others that, at one time, did not meet the inclusion criteria may then be included.

Inclusion and Exclusion CriteriaTo be included in this research, a vendor must deliver a service with the following characteristics:

1. It has to be a cloud service:o Available by subscription and accessible over Internet technologieso Available uniformly to all qualified subscriberso With some built-in sharing of physical resources between logically isolated tenants

(subscribers or applications)o With some built-in self-service provisioning and management by subscriberso With some built-in bidirectional scaling, without interruption of activities and with some

automationo With some built-in instrumentation for tracking of operations

2. It has to be a PaaS:o Encapsulates the underlying virtual or physical machines — and their procurement,

management and direct costs — and does not require subscribers to be aware of them3. It has to be an aPaaS:

o Allows deployment and execution of encoded application logico Includes development tools for encoding of application logic and some management of the

application life cycle4. It has to be enterprise-grade and aimed at enterprise IT users:

o Includes some support for high availability and disaster recoveryo Provides some technical support to paying subscriberso Includes some provisions for securing access to application serviceso Enables formation of SOA-style service APIs for external access to application logic and/or

datao Allows invocation of external service APIs

5. It has to have been generally available as of 31 July 2013.

The aPaaS market is rapidly changing (see "Risks and Opportunities of PaaS at the Peak of Inflated Expectations"). This research represents a snapshot in time. Multiple vendors in the cloud platform market do not appear because they did not have a generally available offering, have not yet implemented sufficient cloudiness or did not target enterprise-style software projects by 31 July 2013. Some of the vendors in this category include:

AT&T CenturyLink (AppFog) CloudJee Dell Fujitsu HP Oracle OrangeScape OutSystems Pivotal ServiceNow Zoho

We recommend that you examine these vendors' offerings in addition to those evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. Many may have advanced to meet your cloud application PaaS requirements.All vendors in the market will be examined again for the 2015 refresh of this Magic Quadrant.

Evaluation CriteriaAbility to ExecuteGartner analysts evaluate technology providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively impact revenue, retention and reputation. Ultimately, technology providers are judged on their ability and success in capitalizing on their vision.

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing Low

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations Low

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Source: Gartner (January 2014)To evaluate the functional capabilities of vendors' available enterprise aPaaS offerings, we examined the vendor's current services and its record in the market for the following characteristics:

Degree of cloudiness: Including tenant isolation; sharing of resources; elasticity; scaling; self-service; and instrumentation for tracking, scaling and billing. (Standard)

Enterprise worthiness: Including high availability; disaster recovery; business continuity; accountability and tracking; compliance; continuous technical support; secure access; protection of data integrity and privacy; access to enterprise resources in the cloud, on-premises and with business partners; internationalization and localization; and support of multichannel and composite architectures. (Standard)

Functional completeness (breadth of offering): Functionality of an application platform, including the runtime execution container for encoded application logic with both user and programmatic interfaces; access to data management and persistence; support of composition of both internal and external services; event messaging; and relevant development and life cycle management tools. (Standard)

Openness: Including the choice of on-/off-premises application deployment; backward compatibility; support of standards (de facto or de jure); use of open-source components; and portability with third-party on- and off-premises platforms. (High)

Developers' productivity and ease of operation: Including ease of learning and use of the programming model and tools; usability by LOB citizen developers; and productivity for advanced developers, life cycle managers and IT operations staff. (High)

SOA support: Including exposure of application functionality via APIs; ability to invoke external APIs; and central API management. (High)

Completeness of VisionGartner analysts evaluate technology providers on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements about current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive forces and how well they map to the Gartner position. Ultimately, technology providers are rated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunity for the provider.

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Innovation Medium

Geographic Strategy Medium

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Source: Gartner (January 2014)To evaluate the forward strategy for functional capabilities of vendors' enterprise aPaaS offerings, we examined the available road maps and credibly committed initiatives for the following characteristics:

Degree of cloudiness: Including tenant isolation; sharing of resources; elasticity; scaling; self-service; and instrumentation for tracking, scaling and billing. (High)

Enterprise worthiness: Including high availability; disaster recovery; business continuity; accountability and tracking; compliance; continuous technical support; secure access; protection of data integrity and privacy; access to enterprise resources in the cloud, on-premises and with business partners; internationalization and localization; and support of multichannel and composite architectures. (High)

Functional completeness (breadth of offering): Functionality of an application platform, including the runtime execution container for encoded application logic with both user and programmatic interfaces; access to data management and persistence; support of composition of both internal and external services; event messaging; and relevant development and life cycle management tools. Also includes the emerging requirements for support for big data management; business analytics; integration of social and other external capabilities; Internet of Things; and context-awareness. (High)

Openness: Including the choice of on-/off-premises application deployment; backward compatibility; support of standards (de facto or de jure); use of open-source components; and portability with third-party on- and off-premises platforms. (Standard)

Developers' productivity and ease of operation: Including ease of learning and use of the programming model and tools; usability by LOB citizen developers; and productivity for advanced developers, life cycle managers and IT operations staff. (Standard)

SOA support: Including exposure of application functionality via APIs; ability to invoke external APIs; and central API management. (High)

Quadrant DescriptionsLeaders

Leaders of a market combine an insightful understanding of the realities of the market, a reliable record, the ability to influence the market's direction, the capability to attract and keep a following, and the capacity to lead.In the enterprise aPaaS market, leadership implies an understanding of the demands of the enterprise and the opportunities of cloud computing and a genuine commitment to enterprise cloud computing. A Leader must have demonstrated a market-leading vision and the ability to deliver on that vision. In this new and still emerging market, few vendors have been in it for long enough to demonstrate sustainable leadership, but multiple vendors are advancing in this direction. We expect notable changes in the market by the time this research is refreshed for 2015.A Leader is not always the best choice for a particular enterprise initiative. A focused, smaller vendor can provide excellent support and commitment to individual mainstream customers, especially when geographic or vertical-industry specifics are important. Such a vendor would not be rated as a Leader in the overall market, but within a specific segment, it may be treated as such.ChallengersChallengers in a market excel in their ability to attract a large user following, but this ability is limited to a subset segment of the market. For members of that target audience, Challengers can be treated as Leaders, but that specificity presents a barrier to adoption for those outside the segment.In the enterprise aPaaS market, a Challenger may have a strong proven presence and following in the Web or mobile development market, but lack traction, commitment or insight in the enterprise market. A Challenger must demonstrate a sustained excellence in execution and must have amassed a significant following, which is hard to achieve in this new, still evolving and forming market. Only one vendor is rated as a Challenger in the enterprise aPaaS market this year, but multiple vendors are likely to reach that level of execution in the coming years.A Challenger can evolve into a Leader if it adopts aggressive, innovative strategies to expand to the full-breadth target market.VisionariesVisionaries in a market are innovators that drive the market forward by responding to the emerging leading-edge customer demands and by offering the businesses of their customers' new opportunities to excel. Typically, these vendors appeal to leading-edge customers, and may have minimal mainstream presence or name recognition. Their ability to deliver sustained dependable execution in the mainstream enterprise markets is not sufficiently tested. Note that the vision of a vendor is not expressed just in its technological innovation; insightful understanding of market trends is also required for visionary marketing, sales, product and business management strategies.In the aPaaS market, some visionary vendors are investing in leading-edge enterprise aPaaS services not yet readily adopted by mainstream enterprise customers, including support of big data and stream analytics, the Internet of Things, and native mobile computing. Other Visionaries excel in understanding enterprise demands on the road to cloud adoption and support high-productivity for LOB users; polyglot high-control for IT developers; integration, orchestration and API management for composite application services; and self-service management for hybrid application deployments.Some Visionaries will eventually grow to become Leaders or will be acquired by them (or by Challengers seeking a leadership position in the market). Others will limit their target markets to focus on their core competencies and will become Niche Players, or they will grow in their specialty to become Challengers.Niche PlayersNiche Players in a market typically specialize in a vertical, geographical or functional specialty, therefore addressing only a segment of a market. Neither their execution nor vision is market-leading; often these are vendors in transition from or to other markets, or they may be subject to excessively conservative risk-averse leadership.In the enterprise aPaaS market, many Niche Players are providers that just recently entered the market with only a limited set of capabilities and have not yet articulated a broad vision and road map, either in technology or in go-to-market terms.Niche Players often represent the best choice for a specific category of buyer, or for a particular use case. They typically offer specialized expertise, focused support practices, flexible terms and conditions, and greater dedication to a particular market segment and its customers.

Some Niche Players will improve their ability to execute and evolve into Challengers. Others will discover innovative solutions that attract interest beyond their niche segments and will emerge as Visionaries. Some will look to strengthen and broaden their businesses to challenge the Leaders. In this fast-changing and consolidating market, opportunities exist for all comers.

ContextThe enterprise aPaaS market is formed by vendors aiming to provide enterprise customers with a cloud platform for the development and execution of cloud-based applications and business solutions. The enterprise aPaaS market targets subscribers in enterprise settings, building new software-based solutions, but constrained by enterprise requirements, policies and regulations.This research covers only the vendors aiming at enterprise customers; however, within this category, vendors still differ in multiple dimensions by the way they envision enterprise realities, requirements, opportunities and best practices in cloud computing:

Developer experience (see "Productivity vs. Control: Cloud Application Platforms Must Split to Win"):o High-productivity: Model-driven graphical development environment, typically producing metadata that

is interpreted at runtime. Some programming is possible, but the core of the application is designed graphically and is interpreted at runtime. Typically proprietary and limited to the most common application design patterns. May be suitable for LOB developers. Ensures a certain degree of application cloudiness. Typically not suitable for unique or advanced application designs.

o High-control: Programming environment based on established on-premises models (Java, Ruby, .NET) that allows for the design of more unique and advanced applications than the high-productivity offerings, but also imposes greater responsibilities on the programmer in creating cloud-compatible applications (stateless, scalable, service-oriented, instrumented for management). Ease of use for the developers is same or less than with comparable on-premises projects.

Model of elasticity (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"):o Shared hardware: Multiple tenants may share the resources of a physical machine, but each VM is

exclusively dedicated to one tenant. The increment of elasticity is the whole VM image. Isolation is implemented by the virtualization hypervisor. Elasticity is implemented by additional control software.

o Shared OS: Multiple tenants share an instance of a virtual or physical server OS, each exclusively occupying an OS process, isolated via OS containers. The increment of elasticity is a containerized OS process, which is more lightweight than a whole VM, making elasticity more fine-grained and more responsive to changing demands (an OS container can be instantiated faster than a VM and, therefore, can be triggered in response to smaller changes in demand). Isolation is implemented via OS containers. Elasticity is implemented by additional control software.

o Shared container: Multiple tenants share an instance of an application platform (aka application container). The increment of elasticity can be a thread, a segment of real memory, a priority level or a database connector. Fine-grained elasticity is the most efficient in responding to changing demands and in density of the resource utilization. Tenant isolation and resource elasticity are implemented inside the application container.

Architecture (see "What IT Leaders Need to Know About Application PaaS Models and Use Patterns"):o IaaS plus middleware (not PaaS): Subscriber provisions VMs and chooses the middleware technology

deployed over the VMs. Subscriber is partly or fully responsible for configuring, tuning and versioning of middleware and the underlying OS, and pays for the use of IaaS resources as well as for the middleware. Subscriber arranges for scaling (typically at additional costs). Provider does not "hide" the system infrastructure and leaves responsibility for the middleware to the subscriber. Although this is middleware functionality offered off a cloud environment, it is not a PaaS experience (or cost structure) for the subscriber.

Vendors that only offer this category of application platform service (such as Adobe, Amazon and Zend) do not qualify for Gartner's aPaaS market research, although they are the appropriate choice for some less strategic enterprise projects.

o Cloud-based: Tenant isolation and elasticity are implemented by software that manages middleware, not in the middleware itself; therefore, the middleware can remain (nearly) fully backward-compatible. Since middleware is unaware of the cloud, the application designers and programmers must be careful not to

violate multitenant cloud "citizenship" rules (avoid access to system resources and APIs, promptly release unused resources, persist state across invocations, and provide tracking APIs).

o Cloud-native: Middleware itself is designed with cloud-awareness and implements tenant detection, provisioning, isolation, resource allocation and elastic scaling. The programming model supported by the middleware also reflects the cloud context, enforcing cloud compliance of applications.

Scope (see the Private PaaS technology profile in "Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service [PaaS], 2013"):o Public: The aPaaS services are operated by the provider in the data center network of the provider's

choice. Software that executes the application is unavailable for review or change, and is fixed and versioned exclusively by the provider.

o Hybrid: The provider of the public aPaaS also offers the software that enables its public service, as a software product (CEAP) that is deployed and managed on-premises at a data center of the buyer's choice. The software may not be 100% the same, but offers sufficient portability and interoperability for a homogeneous hybrid application PaaS.

o Private: Some vendors (such as ActiveState, Apprenda and Jelastic) offer only a CEAP. They are not service providers and are not covered in this research, but their products should be evaluated along with the hybrid providers' software, if the plan is to develop a separately standing private PaaS.

Target audience (see "What IT Leaders Must Know About the Adoption of Platform as a Service"):o LOB developers: Application PaaS targeting LOB citizen-developers must offer high-productivity graphical

design, and easy reference to application data and services. They offer high-productivity, model-driven design of user interfaces. Typically, LOB developers use these tools in conjunction with a SaaS.

o Enterprise IT developers: aPaaS targeting enterprise IT organizations must support development of one-of-a-kind application services — some would choose high-productivity rapid results, while others would opt for high-control, more advanced programming opportunities. The applications are the tenants of the aPaaS — sharing and competing for the resources between them (see "Understanding Tenancy: Salesforce.com Versus Google.com"). Often, the applications have no tenants of their own and are deployed in the cloud for reasons other than multitenancy (delegating system management, time to results, attractive tools or pricing); however, in some cases, custom IT applications may be used by isolated departments or branches within the subscriber organization, and those become tenants of the application and subtenants of the aPaaS.

o SaaS ISVs: aPaaS targeting SaaS ISVs (a key customer category for aPaaS vendors) must provide full support of subtenancy, because the objective of the ISVs is to sell its application services to independent customers. Successful SaaS ISVs will have thousands of tenants of their own. Support of subtenancy for ISVs includes support of tracking and billing per subtenant, version control of the application that is seamlessly delivered to subtenants, management that allows the ISV to control all subtenants (including scaling, failover, backup/restore, noisy neighbor control and security), and the self-service management that is offered to subtenants. In other words, the experience of a subtenant must, within its scope, be the same as the experience of the tenant (the ISV) itself.

Costs:o Fixed: Priced in proportion to the number of registered users (with some established scope boundaries,

such as the number of data objects, and a ceiling on some physical resources, such as bandwidth or storage, with variable overage costs). Users that are significantly under the use thresholds are paying a premium for the predictable budget exposure and relief from the burden of capacity planning and continuous use tracking. Minimal or no system administration of the service is required of the subscriber.

o Variable: Priced in proportion to use of physical resources (models and techniques of price calculation differ, but all include some floor and ceiling thresholds). Users have an opportunity to align their costs to the patterns of use at the cost of having to engage in continuous use tracking and capacity planning. Users that have a steady 24/7 demand pay a premium for the flexibility that they do not utilize. Some system administration of the service by the subscriber is essential.Users are advised to establish where an aPaaS offering belongs across these categories when evaluating and contrasting vendor candidates. Although a given project may be more sensitive to some of the categories than the others, all will have an impact on the overall experience of the subscriber utilizing a selected service. Understanding this impact in relation to the project objectives is the responsibility of the buyer, which should not be delegated to vendors or advisers because the consequences of a wrong choice can span the spectrum from negligible to severe.

Market OverviewThe enterprise aPaaS market is new and unsettled. Although we identify leaders in this research, long-term, sustained leadership of the market remains open to new players. This unsettled state attracts many new vendors aiming at carving out a market share in a strategic software market. What makes the PaaS market strategic is not necessarily the prospect of immediately high direct revenue, but more the degree of influence and control that a vendor can attain, through a strong position in cloud platforms in the much larger, high-stakes market of cloud computing and cloud-based solutions. The platform defines standards to which solutions adhere; it creates communities of developers and innovating ISVs, which bring about the applications and solutions in the first place; and it establishes ecosystems of partners and customers.These strategic opportunities attract many new vendors to the PaaS market, most of which start by introducing an aPaaS. Many create aPaaS solutions in-house, using their own or public open-source software building blocks (such as Google, Red Hat and WSO2), while some enter through acquisitions (such as Software AG, Progress and CenturyLink; see "Risks and Opportunities of PaaS at the Peak of Inflated Expectations"). Some vendors first introduce an aPaaS as an extension to their proprietary SaaS offerings (such as SAP and salesforce.com), while some introduce aPaaS at first as just a different delivery model for their established on-premises offerings (such as Oracle and Red Hat), and others see aPaaS as an opportunity for breakthrough innovation (such as Indra gnubila, Google and MIOsoft). Some players in this market start out with a broader PaaS vision, of which aPaaS is just an element (such as IBM, Microsoft, Software AG and WSO2), but even those that start out more exclusively focused (such as Google, Engine Yard and CloudBees) must, over time, expand beyond just aPaaS to retain their ability to compete.Enterprise IT users too are coming to the aPaaS market in increasing numbers. With the growing adoption of SaaS by mainstream enterprise business and of IaaS by mainstream enterprise IT, more organizations have become familiar with the benefits of cloud computing and more have become dependent on cloud resources. These initial engagements with SaaS or IaaS have opened the door to utilizing cloud resources more fully. aPaaS is engaged to customize and extend SaaS (and iPaaS — to integrate it with other applications). It is also engaged by users that have become comfortable with the use of IaaS, and now wish to increase their productivity and to delegate more responsibility to the cloud services providers by subscribing directly to application infrastructure (instead of indirectly through the subscription to VMs).As vendors are concentrating on the enterprise aPaaS market to increase their cloud computing market influence, and users are drawn to the aPaaS market to take their commitment to cloud computing one step higher, aPaaS is beginning to fall into the Trough of Disillusionment (see "Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service [PaaS], 2013"). Here, real users face the real benefits and costs of a technology, and discover the benefits to be less spectacular than promised and costs higher than expected. The vendors, too, discover that excellence in the application PaaS market is not a trivial challenge. Acquisitions alone do not ensure success: First, the business model and the culture of vendors' operations must change to increase agility, openness and innovation — before the organization can deliver software that's innovative, open and agile.The market reality check for the users and providers of aPaaS will result in the emergence of long-term standards, best practices and leading vendor offerings during the next three to five years. Gartner's enterprise aPaaS Magic Quadrant, refreshed annually, will track the transformation of this broadly impactful market.

Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites29 July 2014 ID:G00266699

Analyst(s): Jess Thompson, Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Kimihiko Iijima, Fabrizio Biscotti, Keith Guttridge

VIEW SUMMARY

Enterprises need application integration functionality that supports a variety of integration patterns using a spectrum of approaches, from systematic to adaptive. We examine vendors with on-premises products that address the resulting wide range of integration use cases.

Market Definition/DescriptionThis document was revised on 30 July 2014. The document you are viewing is the corrected version. For more information, see the Corrections page on gartner.com.Application integration is defined as making independently designed applications work together. In 2008, Gartner published a seminal paper (see "Understanding the Three Patterns of Application Integration") identifying three integration patterns:

Data consistency — The objective of application and data integration is making data across all applications consistent. For example, if a customer changes a billing address in a CRM application, that changed data is pushed out to other applications (such as accounting, billing and ERP) so those applications can update their databases with the new data.

Multistep process — This entails orchestrating the execution of a sequence of business process activities, regardless of whether these activities are performed by software (applications or services), humans or intelligent devices, such as a printer or a programmable logic controller. Comprehensive support for multistep process integration involves supporting multiple styles of business integration, including system-to-system, collaborative, document-centric and administrative.

Composite application — This creates what appears to be a single application, purpose-built from the ground up to address user requirements. When examining the deployment of the application, users will find components, both business logic and data, that are part of existing production applications.Initially, these integration patterns were applied for internal, application-to-application (A2A) integration and for integrating an organization's applications with those of its trading partners — that is, B2B integration. Today, the patterns are applied to a broader array of application integration projects:

Synchronizing data in SaaS applications with on-premises applications (for example, synchronizing customer data in a cloud-based CRM application with customer information in an on-premises ERP system)

Extending data in on-premises applications with data obtained from operational technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) to address a broad range of objectives, from marketing to operational business intelligence

Supporting the incorporation of cloud services into new compositions — that is, cloud service integration Creating new compositions using mobile apps and on-premises back-end services that enable new

customer relationships and empower customers to interact with your enterprise in new ways, thereby creating new opportunities

Supporting the deployment of multienterprise processes that bring new efficiencies and cost savings upstream in supply chain management (SCM), and downstream to warehouse management and third-party logistics activitiesIn 2011, Gartner introduced the concept of Nexus of Forces driven by:

Social computing, which changed the behavior of customers and employees. Mobile computing, which gives organizations new ways to access applications and data, act as a

platform for social computing and provide a new platform for information. Cloud computing, which provides new styles of delivery and acts as a platform for social computing,

mobile computing and information.

Information, often in the form of big data, provides context for social, mobile and cloud computing.The interaction of Nexus of Forces with one another amplifies the effect of the forces taken individually, which is what makes the Nexus of Forces so impactful to integration.Today, digital business is driven by the interrelation of people, business and things. In 2012, a CEO of a large multinational enterprise stated that the ability to marry real-time customer data with real-time performance data of the company's products is "the Holy Grail in our business."The challenge is that there will be 30 billion devices in the IoT by 2020, according to Gartner research (see "What the Board of Directors Needs to Know About Digital Business"). These devices will introduce new modes of interaction among users, adding to the infrastructure and integration requirements of enterprises.

Magic QuadrantFigure 1. Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites

Source: Gartner (July 2014)

Vendor Strengths and CautionsAdeptiaAdeptia is not as widely known as the Leaders in this Magic Quadrant. It has been offering application integration technology since 2003, and has grown organically, maintaining a single-package concept. Adeptia Integration Suite (AIS) 6.2 supports multiple integration project types — including A2A, service-oriented architecture (SOA), B2B, business process management (BPM) and data management — that can be incorporated into a package requiring only one installation.The feature set is founded on an enterprise service bus (ESB) and supports data mapping, process design and execution (orchestration), all within a single code base. The platform is designed to support all integration patterns (data consistency, multistep process and composite application integration) found in A2A, B2B and cloud-to-on-premises integration project types. Its features are enabled via keys as the necessary licenses are procured. AIS stores its metadata using a single repository, which also supports collaboration. However, Adeptia has limited support for mobile integration and lacks comprehensive plans for integrating with devices.With more than 430 customers, Adeptia is used across a range of verticals, including healthcare (UnitedHealthcare), mobile devices (Nokia) and investment banking (MassMutual). A factor that significantly contributed to this growth is that Adeptia offers multiple consumption models, including commercial software licenses, subscription, hosted services and cloud-hosted integration services.Strengths

Adeptia provides a comprehensive, integrated and feature-rich application infrastructure suite with leading technologies to support systematic application integration, SOA infrastructure requirements and BPM technology. Its entire set of features is implemented in a single code base eliminating the need for costly integration activities.

Adeptia offers a large variety of consumption models: commercially licensed software, enterprise licensing, subscription-based pricing for on-premises deployments, managed services and cloud hosted models, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). This establishes an advantage for Adeptia, as more than 50% of its target audience has adopted integration technology. Adeptia uses pricing effectively, making its products attractive increasingly to conservative large businesses, as well as small or midsize businesses (SMBs).

Adeptia grew 21% during 2013, when some leading vendors grew less than 5%. Adeptia is revamping its marketing with the message that integration technology must support both

business and IT. Its initial offering, Adeptia Connect, has a user experience similar to that of a social Web property (e.g., TweetDeck).Cautions

Adeptia's greatest challenge is gaining visibility in a market where the incumbent Leaders have huge sales and marketing budgets.

Adeptia currently lacks functionality to address some upcoming types of integration projects. For example, its basic API management capabilities provide only limited support for mobile app integration.

Adeptia lacks comprehensive plans for supporting the integration of devices that can be located on-premises (e.g., programmable logic controllers, RFID sensors) or accessed via the IoT (e.g., smart alarm systems, refrigerators, automobiles).

Adeptia offers adapters to endpoints, such as salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and has partnered with RSSBus for an additional 20 cloud adapters. However, this combined portfolio is more limited than several competing vendors' offerings.AxwayAxway's technology portfolio has been assembled through internal development and several successful acquisitions. Example products for systematic application integration projects are Axway B2Bi 2.0, Axway API Gateway 7.3, Axway ProcessManager 2.3, Axway Transfer CFT 3.1, Axway PassPort 4.6.0 and Axway Sentinel 4.0.1. These products have been adopted in industries such as automotive, pharmaceutical, logistics, the public sector, financial services and healthcare.Axway's products and services focus on helping customers connect, manage and optimize data flows across the enterprise, to B2B communities, and to cloud and mobile devices. The Axway product portfolio and solutions address B2B, integration and managed file transfers (MFTs). Axway API Gateway supports

SOA governance and API management. It has advanced its use to govern data flows, regardless of the type of integration that is executed.Axway is experiencing growing pressure from competing megavendors, proliferating integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offerings and smaller specialists (such as Extol International and Adeptia) that are pursuing B2B use cases at a lower price point. Other Leaders are responding to this situation with iPaaS, because its costs are based on resource consumption. Axway's strategy remains that of creating differentiating functionality focused on application services governance.Strengths

With $332.5 million revenue in 2013, Axway has sufficient revenue to separate it from Visionaries. Moreover, its growth of 10.8% in 2013 is more than the large integration vendors (IBM, Oracle, Software AG, Tibco Software and Microsoft). Axway's brand awareness is strongest in Europe and the U.S.

Axway has strong B2B gateway, API management and MFT capabilities, which are available as on-premises software and hosted offerings.

Founded on its API management functionality, Axway's strategy is valuable and unique. The company helps customers connect, manage and optimize data flows across the enterprise, to B2B communities, and to cloud and mobile devices.

Axway offers mature and widely adopted technology for file-based integration projects.Cautions

Axway is experiencing growing pressure from megavendors, proliferating iPaaS offerings and smaller specialists pursuing B2B use cases at low price points. While other Leaders are responding to this situation with iPaaS, Axway's strategy remains that of creating differentiating functionality.

Axway API Gateway contains ESB suite functionality. However, Axway's marketing does not advertise its ESB capabilities. This puts it behind other ESB suite providers when a prospective customer requires technology for near-real-time, low-latency A2A integration projects.

Awareness of the Axway brand, as well as third-party resources for professional services, is limited outside the U.S. and EMEA. Awareness could potentially improve since Axway recently opened offices in Melbourne, Australia, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.Fiorano SoftwareFounded in 1995, Fiorano Software (referred to as Fiorano) was one of the first vendors to offer an ESB product. Its application integration products include Fiorano SOA Platform 10.1, FioranoMQ 10.0, Fiorano API Management 10.1, Fiorano B2B 10.1 and Fiorano Adapters.Fiorano's ESB is architected to be deployed as a set of peer servers that are monitored and managed by a central Fiorano ESB Enterprise Server. This architecture enables services to communicate directly with each other, resulting in an efficient, facilitated peer-to-peer architecture without going through a central hub. The facilitated peer-to-peer architecture makes it particularly well-suited for the integration of real-time systems. The U.S. Coast Guard Spill Planning, Exercise and Response System (SPEARS) project used it to integrate applications and to integrate data from a wider range of devices, including aircraft transponders, radar, sonobuoys and satellites.Fiorano offers compatibility with diverse OSs and application servers. It connects natively to applications developed using a number of programming styles, including Java, C++ and .NET. It requires only the availability of Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.6 or later as a runtime container.Fiorano's highly productive development process — i.e., what is specified graphically is exactly what is executed — provides adopters with the advantage of a single technology that can support systematic and adaptive integration projects.Strengths

Fiorano is one of the earliest ESB vendors. Fiorano-facilitated peer-to-peer architecture makes it well-suited for the integration of real-time systems (e.g., transponders, radar sonobuoys and satellites) and specialized use cases for integrating devices from the IoT.

Fiorano offers a unique and highly productive interface development process. The graphical specification is exactly what is executed, which makes it usable for developers who are not integration specialists.

The vendor has a proven, scalable and reliable message-based integration platform that can be used on-premises or as the Fiorano Cloud Platform, a cloud-hosted (but not iPaaS) offering. As a cloud-hosted service, Fiorano Cloud Platform enables cloud service integration.

Fiorano can address a broad range of use cases, including integrating applications (simple to high end) and sophisticated SOA (including event-driven architecture [EDA]), on-premises and cloud-based applications or services, and operational technologies (system integration). This enables it to target large enterprises with complex interface requirements. SMBs increasingly adopt Fiorano because of its ability to connect natively to .NET applications, a significantly low list price and ease of use.Cautions

Fiorano has top-rated technology, but, after almost 20 year in business, it has a limited number of clients. The vendor has a small sales staff and relatively low market visibility.

Because Fiorano is a small business (less than 500 people), it likely will encounter challenges in attracting small, risk-averse technology adopters.

Fiorano SOA Platform has API management, but its features are not as comprehensive as those provided by vendors with more mature implementations.

The Fiorano B2B offering is relatively new, has been adopted by fewer enterprises than B2B gateway software from other providers, and has not yet demonstrated the ability to scale to a large number (millions) of B2B interactions per day. It does not use MFT technology, which delivers documents reliably, one-time only, to external endpoints, and lacks some benefits of MFT, such as end-to-end visibility into B2B interactions.FujitsuFujitsu's application integration product family includes Interstage Service Integrator 9.5.1, Interstage Host Access Service 10.0.1 (SOA adapter to Fujitsu mainframe), Interstage Information Integrator 11.0.1, Interstage Interaction Manager 10.1.0 (Web development/integration), and Interstage Information Quality 10.2.0 (data quality).Fujitsu extends its Interstage application integration platform with products such as Interstage AR Processing Server (augmented reality), Interstage Big Data Complex Event Processing Server 1.1.0, and in-memory computing technologies Interstage eXtreme Transaction Processing Server 1.1.0 and Interstage Teracotta 4.0.1, which support integration scenarios requiring extreme speed. Fujitsu is updating the user experience of its portfolio to address systematic and adaptive (bimodal) development approaches by incorporating offerings such as RunMyProcess.Fujitsu's integration products have been adopted by many industry segments, including financial, telecom, public sectors (e.g., social Web infrastructure) and manufacturing, which demand high performance, reliability and availability.Fujitsu has two distinctive go-to-market strategies for its Interstage business: (1) Leverage system integration business, in which Fujitsu has the best track record in Japan, to address new market segments requiring innovation and agility such as the game industry; and (2) Focus on prepackaged solutions to leverage its presence as a hardware provider outside Japan.Strengths

Fujitsu Interstage Service Integrator is a mission-critical, proven ESB, which is one of the key products supporting Fujitsu's (approximately) $31 billion technology solution business (system platform, hardware, sourcing and system integration services).

Fujitsu offers a broad spectrum of Interstage integration capabilities, including applications, data, cloud, mobile and machine-to-machine integration which can be applied to address requirements from Nexus of Forces projects (mobile, cloud, information, social) and IoT.

Fujitsu Interstage has established its reputation in demanding, large-scale mission-critical use scenarios with thousands of large-enterprise customers that are a part of an installed base in more than 40 major countries.

In its Innovation Centers in the U.S. and the U.K., Fujitsu has demonstrated coupling its integration technology with Interstage AR Processing Server to connect mobile devices, cameras and apps with back-end end systems to support the movement of structured and unstructured content. This has resulted in multiple million dollar sales.Cautions

Most of Fujitsu's Interstage initiatives and products are first released in Japan, where most of the resulting revenue comes from. Consequently, its brand recognition and installed base outside Japan are still developing.

Fujitsu provides multiple products that support on-premises and cloud integration projects, but the integration of those offerings at the product and metadata management levels is not smooth.

Fujitsu's API management offering is under development, making it late to market; its features seem to be basic and miss the vision of an API ecosystem and marketplace.

Fujitsu's Interstage business depends on its system integration business in Japan. This makes it difficult for the vendor to develop an innovative vision of Interstage and to demonstrate its capability outside Japan.IBMIBM has been a player in the application integration middleware market since the early 1990s, when it introduced IBM MQSeries (now IBM WebSphere MQ) message-oriented middleware (MOM). The company has been expanding its offerings in the application integration suite market through acquisitions (e.g., Ascential Software, Cast Iron, DataPower and Sterling Commerce) and by internal development, including WebSphere Application Server, IBM Integration Bus (formerly WebSphere Message Broker), and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.During 2013, IBM added API Management to its product line to support an increasing volume of transactions taking place on mobile and in the cloud. IBM updated products to provide deeper insights with offerings that can be assembled into a platform for intelligent business operations.IBM's products relevant in the on-premises application integration suite market are WebSphere Transformation Extender 8.4, Sterling Connect:Direct 5.1.1, Rational Asset Manager 7.5.1.1, Sterling B2B Integrator 5.2.4, WebSphere Application Server 8.5, IBM Business Monitor 8.0.1, WebSphere MQ 7.5, PureApplication Systems 1.1. Other products are API Management 2.0; WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration as a cloud service, virtual appliance and hardware appliance, 7.0; WebSphere DataPower Appliances XG45, XI52, XB62, hardware and virtual editions, 6.0.1; IBM Integration Bus 9.1; and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository 8.5.Strengths

IBM has brand recognition, global reach and market share in key application infrastructure middleware segments. It has mind share, and a large and loyal installed base of hardware and software products leveraged for IBM sales to support application integration projects.

The company has a comprehensive product line, including market-leading offerings in MOM, ESB, MFT and application integration and middleware (AIM) appliances, as well as strong contenders in B2B gateways, cloud integration and application service governance. When combined with IBM's partner program, which provides a range of consulting and professional services, IBM demonstrates it has the technology and the expertise to meet almost any large integration challenge.

A wealth of marketing initiatives and vertical and horizontal solutions (e.g., Smarter Cities, Smarter Commerce, Smarter Oil and Gas, and Smarter Banking) containing process templates and integration frameworks are driving adoption of IBM's application infrastructure products within a variety of use cases, including application integration projects.

At Impact, the annual user conference, IBM emphasized its focus on the composable business and cloud, with integration services for IBM Bluemix being a key building block in connecting everything together. IBM is committing substantial resources for delivering products that support its vision for integration.Cautions

The implementation of large-scale application integration projects may require many IBM products. (Gartner considered 12 products when assessing IBM. Most organization will use approximately half that number of products.) The total cost of the set necessary for a client's projects can be expensive and may require a significant number of professional services to get the multiple products up and running, configured and working together to address the user organization's requirements.

The pace of IBM's acquisitions in the application infrastructure space continuously presents IBM with product rationalization and positioning challenges. These challenges could expose users to product discontinuity or migration problems when using some of the noncore products, such as the recent move away from WebSphere ESB.

Despite plans to simplify the ESB product portfolio, IBM still offers a variety of products with some overlapping features. For example, there are some integration scenarios that can be fulfilled by using IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere Cast Iron, WebSphere Transformation Extender or the WebSphere

DataPower XI52/XB62 in isolation or in combination. This makes it difficult for potential users to determine which products will best suit their requirements.

While IBM has a capable product family for almost every integration need, the products are sufficiently complex that (excluding WebSphere Cast Iron) they are not best-suited for adaptive integration or citizen integrator approaches.InforInfor is primarily a provider of packaged and SaaS business applications. The company entered the on-premises integration platform suite market in February 2011, with the release of the Infor Intelligent Open Network (ION) platform founded on ION Connect, an event-based ESB technology. In ION, every business event is normalized as a canonical object. ION's primary goal is to enable plug-and-play interoperability across Infor's packaged applications and SaaS offering. However, it is often used to integrate with third-party software products and cloud services.During the past three years, the ION platform has been extended in functionality to include workflow capability and event management (ION Process), a real-time event repository (ION Business Vault), a B2B software gateway (ION Connect 3P), an elastic scaling and multitenant foundation (ION Grid), a metadata repository (ION Registry), technology and packaged application adapters, and an adapter development toolkit. ION Desk is the unified modeling, development, monitoring and management tool for the platform. Infor plans to make ION available as an iPaaS (ION Cloud Edition) in 3Q14. The Infor10 Motion extends ION with a mobile-enabling platform. A variety of Infor-provided mobile apps leverage Infor10 Motion, but the product's functionality is only partially available to clients and partners.The evaluation of Infor in this Magic Quadrant is based on ION v.11.1 released in February 2014.Strengths

Despite being in the market for a relatively short time (less than three years), the ION product has accumulated a notable installed base of approximately 2,000 clients in North America (over 60% of the company's customers), EMEA (around 30%) and Asia/Pacific (10%). Midsize and large organizations use the product to integrate Infor cloud-based and on-premises applications with each other and with third-party applications.

ION is based on an original EDA that supports rapid integration between Infor applications and provides detailed visibility of end-to-end (in flight and completed) business processes. The business events dispatched through ION can be stored in an event repository (the Business Vault), which can be utilized for analytics or to retrieve past events. ION provides RESTful/JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) interfaces (ION Pulse APIs) that applications can use to publish and receive events. The core event-based architecture is extended with SOAP and REST connectivity, workflow, event management and prepackaged integration with Infor's applications and social networking environment (Infor Ming.le).

Reference clients cite ease of use, reliability, low cost and rapid, plug-and-play integration of Infor applications as some of the ION's strengths.

In addition to releasing ION Cloud Edition, Infor's road map for ION includes the introduction of a rich set of APIs and API management capabilities to expand mobile app integration capabilities, further integration between Infor ION and Infor Ming.le, operational intelligence support, and the availability of prepackaged integration processes as cloud services.Cautions

Despite its open, standards-based architecture, ION primarily attracts Infor application clients that need to integrate and automate business processes spanning multiple Infor, and possibly some non-Infor, applications. The strong focus of this type of scenario makes it scarcely appealing for organizations with a zero or minimal Infor footprint in their application portfolios.

Most ION public references and ION clients Gartner spoke with are midsize organizations, often integrating a relatively small number of applications (less than 10) and managing relatively low volumes of daily business events (tens of thousands). Therefore, the platform's ability to support large-scale use cases is yet to be fully proven.

ION provides a mapping capability that can support translation from XML to/from some electronic data interchange (EDI) formats (e.g., Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transportation [EDIFACT] and ANSI X11). Clients needing to extend the ION-capabilities to other forms of EDI-based integration are supported via a third-party specialized partner (Trubiquity).

The company's road map for ION lags leading competitors in areas such as advanced support for mobile app integration (e.g., database replication, Web streaming), in-memory computing enablement, MFT, advanced B2B capabilities (e.g., trading-partner community management) and IoT integration.InterSystemsInterSystems is a privately owned company offering application infrastructure and packaged applications. It is a leader in the healthcare application infrastructure and integration markets, where it demonstrates market-leading insight and execution. Its application and data integration capabilities are provided by InterSystems Ensemble (launched in 2003), its collection of prebuilt integration adapters and its adapter development framework. InterSystems Ensemble v.2014.1 is an integrated application development, deployment, composition and integration platform built on the vendor's Caché object and relational database. InterSystems Ensemble is available as a hosted service on Amazon Web Services (AWS).InterSystems HealthShare builds on InterSystems Ensemble, and provides specialized application integration and analytics capabilities for the healthcare industry. The company claims to have more than 1,500 customers, of which the significant majority is in the healthcare industry.InterSystems is a steady and strong player in a niche market. Its investment in key application functionality for healthcare customers, in an industry that is undergoing some dramatic changes, indicates the company's insight and ability to execute in that market. However, InterSystems' effort to expand beyond the healthcare industry and build generally recognized brand name and market share have had limited success, despite multiple years of efforts. A new company investment in this initiative is expected.Strengths

InterSystems has a well-integrated technology suite with some advanced capabilities, including a dual-mode (object-oriented and relational) database (Caché), an internal architecture based on event processing on the InterSystems Ensemble platform, a large collection of application and protocol adapters (especially rich for the healthcare industry), multilayer business process orchestration tools, and increasingly sophisticated business analytics (InterSystems DeepSee and iKnow).

Name recognition in the healthcare industry as an integration technology provider (InterSystems Ensemble), as well as advanced support of healthcare industry integration standards and protocols, enables InterSystems to compete effectively against the software industry megavendors, such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

InterSystems' formidable presence in the healthcare industry is based on a profitable private business with no debt, and a growing worldwide presence and large number of independent software vendor (ISV) partners. Its offerings for electronic health record exchange — InterSystems HealthShare and InterSystems TrakCare — maintain the vendor's vertical industry leadership as the worldwide healthcare industry undergoes continuous strategic changes.Cautions

Despite a multiyear effort, InterSystems experiences limited adoption as an application integration platform provider outside the healthcare market. This, combined with a minimal presence in and influence on industry trends, consortia and standards initiatives (outside healthcare), has limited the vendor to being a Niche Player in the overall application infrastructure market.

The company is relatively slow in responding to the general market trends: It has no support for MFT, API management, social, private cloud or IoT technologies and only basic support of cloud and mobile application integration (although the continuing investment in business analytics is a notable exception driven by the demand for greater contextual awareness in healthcare decisions).

InterSystems Ensemble is unavailable as iPaaS, but is available on AWS as a hosted offering. InterSystems Ensemble is not a cloud-enabled product: It does not provide self-service management, is not designed for elastic sharing of resources and does not take advantage of AWS auto-scaling. The longer the company delays updating InterSystems Ensemble to support private and public cloud, the more it will see more customers migrate to third-party cloud-native integration solutions.

The proprietary internal architecture of InterSystems Ensemble and Caché makes it difficult to natively integrate acquired technologies beyond simple API-based interoperability. This limits the company's

ability to rapidly grow through acquisition. Relying on internal organic growth to compete in the general market may be a slow and expensive strategy.MicrosoftMicrosoft's primary integration offerings include BizTalk Server 2013 R2 for on-premises integration, and Microsoft Azure BizTalk Services and Microsoft Azure Service Bus for integration hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. BizTalk Server has the largest customer base of any commercial offering (excluding unsupported open-source software [OSS] offerings).With BizTalk Server 2013 R2, Microsoft has switched to a per-core licensing model, which requires that a minimum of four cores be purchased for a production server. The product continues to be tightly integrated with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. Microsoft has declared its intention to support the hosting of interfaces developed using BizTalk Server to its BizTalk Services offering. BizTalk Server 2013 R2 incorporates Microsoft's BizTalk ESB Toolkit, which had been provided as a separate, but free-of-charge, offering.With BizTalk Services, Microsoft is investing heavily in cloud integration capabilities. It plans to evolve BizTalk Services to include features comparable with BizTalk Server, such as data transformation, orchestration, a business rule engine and business activity monitoring. Until BizTalk Server and BizTalk Services are functionally at parity and it has been demonstrated that a BizTalk Server interface will execute on BizTalk Services, Microsoft customers will increasingly have to decide whether to implement interfaces on BizTalk Server or BizTalk Services and Azure Service Bus.Strengths

Microsoft estimates that BizTalk Server has more than 12,000 integration customer deployments worldwide. This installed base has resulted in the broad availability of service providers and consultants with BizTalk Server skills, as well as a thriving market for BizTalk Server add-ins, such as BizTalk360 (a tool frequently adopted to provide more efficient monitoring and management of BizTalk Server).

BizTalk Server makes extensive use of the programming model, which enables .NET developers to adapt to BizTalk Server's approach to developing interfaces. This results in a large pool of developers from which organizations can draw to support the development, operation and maintenance of BizTalk Server interfaces.

Microsoft uses price as a competitive advantage for its current SOA infrastructure offerings: BizTalk Server and BizTalk Server hosted on Microsoft Azure. The .NET framework and AppFabric are provided at no additional cost as part of Windows environments.

Microsoft continues to provide, to the greatest extent possible, portability of BizTalk Server interfaces to BizTalk Services.Cautions

Microsoft is expanding BizTalk Services with releases of new features approximately every two months. However, the current BizTalk Services will not support many of the BizTalk Server features embedded in interface flows, which could potentially impact the long-term viability of investments that customers have made in BizTalk Server.

Microsoft's cloud-first strategy is resulting in functionality supporting initiatives such as mobile app integration and the integration of devices in the IoT added to Azure (e.g., Azure Mobile Services). BizTalk Server users pursuing such initiatives should plan on implementing a hybrid platform containing BizTalk Server and Azure services.

The growing maturity and adoption of OSS application integration offerings, available for free (but with support and maintenance subscription costs) likely will attract customers that previously would have chosen BizTalk Server because of its CPU-based licensing.MuleSoftMuleSoft is a venture-capital-funded OSS company that provides software subscriptions and cloud services (e.g., iPaaS, built on the open-source Mule technology). Driven by its customers and ecosystem, MuleSoft has organized its extensive portfolio of features into three platforms: Anypoint Platform for SOA, Anypoint Platform for SaaS Integration and Anypoint Platform for APIs. Depending on the platform, the features may include Mule ESB, Anypoint Studio, Anypoint DataMapper, Anypoint Connectors (adapters), Mule Enterprise Management, Mule Business Event Analyzer, Anypoint Enterprise Security, Anypoint

Service Registry, Mule BPM, Mule APIkit and Mule Rules Engine. Anypoint Platform for SaaS requires Gold support, and high availability and clustering requires Platinum support.MuleSoft competes in a market where many vendors offer classically licensed commercial software products requiring capital expenditure. In response to this state of affairs, MuleSoft pursues an open-core, commercial open-source model. The core ESB is an open-source-community product. MuleSoft sells license subscriptions to its Anypoint Platform products.One of the early OSS ESB providers, MuleSoft has evolved its offerings to focus on supporting integration, regardless of whether the applications are hosted on-premises or in the cloud. However, many offerings (e.g., adapters) are oriented toward supporting integration involving cloud-based resources.Strengths

The vendor has over 3 million downloads, production deployments in 4,100 organizations and 850 supported customers worldwide, with a growing number of references using Mule ESB in mission-critical deployments.

Anypoint Studio, MuleSoft's integrated development environment (IDE), offers graphical and code-level views of integration logic that remain synchronized, regardless of where changes are made. Anypoint Studio integrates with Maven to manage metadata for A2A, B2B, cloud-to-on-premises and cloud-to-cloud integration.

MuleSoft is focused on supporting cloud-based integration. Two-thirds of its more than 120 adapters use cloud-based resources.

MuleSoft has leveraged its venture capital funding to differentiate it from competitors. It is particularly adept at capitalizing on the Web, often appearing in articles identified by Google alerts and in Google click-through ads.Cautions

MuleSoft's offerings compete with other vendors' open-core offerings, and commercial products with feature sets that include MFT capabilities, and more comprehensive BPM and business rule management offerings. Thus, some OSS consumers might consider other OSS offerings that provide this functionality.

MuleSoft's support of data integration is currently limited. It supports transformation, batch scheduling and data synchronization, and the movement of data to and connectivity with big data stores, such as Apache Hadoop, MongoDB and Cassandra. However, it lacks critical features, such as data modeling and the capture of metadata, data profiling and quality, data federation/virtualization, and high availability and disaster recovery of data. Thus, some OSS consumers might consider other OSS providers with more comprehensive data integration suites.

MuleSoft lacks extensive B2B integration features, such as trading-partner management, connection self-provisioning and a portal that enables trading partners with limited IT skills to input transaction data as an alternative to sending EDI documents, for example.

MuleSoft supports Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) and Object Management Group Data Distribution Service (OMG DDS) needed for integrating with devices in the IoT. It has not yet addressed the complex processing of events from those devices or the real-time analytics needed to support operational business intelligence.OracleOracle's application infrastructure middleware offering — Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) — has been evolving through internal development and acquisitions. Since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle owns the intellectual property of the key Java technology set. Oracle sells OFM as a set of stand-alone products and product suites, but elements of the stack are also leveraged as enablers for its packaged application business, public cloud initiative (Oracle Cloud) and Oracle Engineered Systems offerings.Primary in OFM's support of application integration is Oracle SOA Suite (Oracle Service Bus, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Business Rules, Oracle B2B, Oracle JDeveloper and other components). SOA Suite supports Oracle Service Registry and Oracle Enterprise Repository for application service governance, and Oracle Enterprise Manager for administration, monitoring, management and governance.

The evaluation of Oracle for this Magic Quadrant considers the current OFM 11g and OFM 12c versions of the products. WebLogic Server and Oracle Coherence 12c have been available since early 2012. Oracle SOA Suite 12c, Oracle BPM Suite 12c and Oracle JDeveloper 12c were released in June 2014.Strengths

With approximately $3.3 billion in product licenses and maintenance revenue in 2013, Oracle is the second-largest application infrastructure middleware vendor in the market, according to Gartner market share data. Organizations worldwide in many vertical industries have successfully deployed combinations of OFM products, in a large number of cases to support large and business-critical application integration and SOA scenarios. These projects involve Oracle's packaged applications, as well as non-Oracle-centric applications.

OFM provides a comprehensive, integrated (a common development toolset, management environment, metadata services and runtime platform) and feature-rich application infrastructure offering, complemented by Oracle's data integration technology (sold separately). Oracle SOA Suite provides leading technologies to support a wide range of application integration and SOA infrastructure requirements.

Reference clients cite the comprehensiveness of the platform, its ability to support a wide range of use cases, reliability, stability, performance (especially in combination with the Oracle Exalogic integrated system), ample support for technology standards, and the high level of integration with many acquired components as strengths for the Oracle SOA Suite.

Oracle's 12-month road map for OFM addresses key application integration technologies (e.g., enhanced mapping, a new MFT capability, REST/JSON support, Web sockets, big data connectivity, API management), emerging requirements (e.g., cloud service integration via support for popular Oracle and non-Oracle SaaS applications), delivery models (public cloud and integrated systems) and advanced quality of service (QoS) — zero downtime patching, fast failover, and improved in-memory enablement via Coherence. A significant part of these new capabilities is available in Oracle SOA Suite 12c.Cautions

Oracle SOA Suite 11g clients mention challenges due to long and cumbersome installation and setup processes, often requiring specialized skills, as well as complexity in monitoring, management and problem determination.

Many reference clients said Oracle was a difficult vendor to deal with from a commercial perspective; some large and loyal OFM users continue to report dissatisfaction with Oracle's standard support.

Although it incorporates some API management capabilities in the Oracle Mobile Platform, the company lags other vendors in this hot new area.

Oracle's growing number of B2B integration vertical offerings (e.g., healthcare, SCM, travel and transportation) will increase the company's ability to compete against B2B specialists and other application integration middleware providers. Nonetheless, Oracle hasn't reached the same market awareness and momentum of the incumbent B2B players in these markets.Red HatIn September 2012, Red Hat acquired FuseSource, an OSS ESB provider, from Progress Software. The products are based on Apache offerings ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, Camel and CXF. Red Hat released v.6 of Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat JBoss A-MQ in April 2013, and v.6.0 of Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works in February 2014, which added service orchestration (jBPM and RiftSaw), rules processing (Drools), a structured service framework and visual tools (SwitchYard), service life cycle management (Overlord Design Time Governance [DTGov]) and business transaction monitoring capabilities (Overlord Runtime Governance [RTGov]).While Red Hat has had integration capabilities since the incorporation of JBoss ESB in the JBoss SOA suite (the predecessor of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform), it has only recently shifted its marketing and sales focus to being an integration vendor as well. Red Hat's drive to be a major player in the IaaS and PaaS markets has helped it shift focus, although it is still seen as developer-centric. Red Hat's strategy is to provide a number of PaaS solutions (e.g., application, integration, BPM and mobile) for cloud and on-premises deployment models. When combined with Red Hat's marketing focus to accelerate application development and performance, integrate applications, services and data, and automate business

processes and decisions, Red Hat has the potential to provide a powerful on-premises integration suite that complements its application development/deployment and BPM offerings.Strengths

JBoss Fuse offers a solid foundation of OSS application integration components (including Apache ActiveMQ, Camel and CXF), which are extended with management, monitoring and governance capabilities and an IDE. The JBoss middleware portfolio extends these with a broad array of complimentary offerings, including JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Data Grid, JBoss Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise BRMS and BPM Suite, JBoss Enterprise Data Virtualization and Red Hat OpenShift.

The broad acceptance of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, based on the JBoss Application Server, across most verticals and geographies, as well as its commitment to be fully open source, has a strong and growing appeal for many IT organizations, including governments.

The Red Hat engineers are prolific contributors to Apache communities that create and extend the integration offerings (e.g., Apache Camel, Karaf, CXF, ActiveMQ). This ensures that they understand the technologies and are able to provide excellent support.

With Red Hat already providing solutions such as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat OpenShift that focus on large-scale deployments and cloud computing, the company has shown it understands iPaaS, putting it in a strong position for the next generation of self-service application and integration middleware.Cautions

Organizations that use Red Hat JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform will have to migrate to Red Hat JBoss Fuse platforms to take advantage of the latest integration capabilities, which will be the focus of Red Hat development, or move to another vendor's platform.

The initial JBoss Fuse offerings are targeted toward technical developers and are more difficult to use than HTML5-based offerings from competing providers.

Red Hat is more well-known for RHEL and Fedora Linux distributions and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, than for its integration products. As a result, it generally isn't one of the first names that appear on RFP shortlists for integration projects. Red Hat has changed its marketing to address awareness of its integration capabilities, but still has some way to go.

The adapters offered by Red Hat are primarily technical in nature (e.g., DBMSs and MOM). However, it partners with GT Software for mainframe adapters, SAP for SAP integration solutions, and others for industry-specific adapters. Red Hat is creating adapters in the Apache Camel community, but is a little behind some of the other vendors in this space.SAPSAP on-premises integration platform capabilities consist of several products in the SAP NetWeaver product family. The most relevant products are SAP Process Orchestration (SAP PO) 7.4 and SAP Gateway 2.08. SAP PO incorporates the former SAP NetWeaver Process Integration and SAP NetWeaver BPM products and provides ESB, application services governance, orchestration and B2B integration capabilities. SAP Gateway primarily supports integration of mobile apps with SAP back-end applications via the REST/Open Data (OData) protocol. SAP PO went through a major architectural refresh in v.7.31 when the product was moved on top of a Java foundation. Previously, SAP PO required users to deploy a Java application server and the SAP Basis/Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) stack (SAP's proprietary application platform/programming language). SAP Gateway currently only deploys on the Basis/ABAP stack.SAP technologies are available as stand-alone products, but are often embedded in, or prerequisites for, several other SAP offerings. For example, SAP PO deployment is required to support SAP master data management (MDM). When consuming SAP PO and SAP Gateway for SAP-to-SAP integration, clients do not need to pay a license for the products. However, they need to pay for a license when using the products for non-SAP applications.SAP's on-premises integration platform products are sold worldwide through the company's direct sales organization, typically to organizations that have a significant number of SAP packaged applications. Consequently, SAP PO and SAP Gateway penetration in geographies and verticals reflects adoption of SAP's packaged applications.

Strengths SAP on-premises integration platform technology accounts for a massive installed-base — more than

6,000 clients for SAP PO and its predecessors (SAP Process Integration [PI] and SAP eXchange Infrastructure [XI]), and more than 9,000 for SAP Gateway. SAP application customers use the technology to support use cases ranging from medium scale and complexity, to large-scale and business-critical scenarios involving a variety of SAP and non-SAP applications and/or large communities of partners.

SAP PO provides a wide and mature range of classic A2A and B2B integration capabilities extended with a rich portfolio of prepackaged integration templates. Clients cite the stability of the platform; the simplified deployment, development and management of the single Java stack; and the distributed, scale-out architecture enabled by the Advanced Adapter Engine as some of the product's key strengths.

SAP's on-premises integration platform is increasingly integrated with the SAP Hana in-memory DBMS. Thus, SAP has an opportunity to natively leverage in-memory computing to provide greater scalability, performance and real-time operational intelligence capabilities in the context of integration projects.

SAP's vision is further improved by a road map covering API management, AS4/ebXML support, trading-partner community management, MFT, enhanced integration with SAP Solution Manager, further product consolidation (e.g., a Java-based version of SAP Gateway to be integrated in SAP PO) and general availability of SAP Hana Cloud Integration (an iPaaS rendition of several SAP integration technology components).Cautions

Despite the notable improvements and simplification delivered in recent versions of SAP PO, the product does not appeal to organizations with limited or no SAP applications and cloud services, or with minimal SAP technology skills.

Some reference clients deem SAP's on-premises integration platform technology unsuitable for supporting adaptive integration and agile development methods in projects of low to medium complexity, a stringent time to value and continuously evolving requirements.

Some reference clients mentioned the following areas as needing improvement: integration of SAP PO, Gateway and Data Service, fully rounded-up support from SAP Solution Manager, MFT capability, native B2B support (in some cases, clients must complement SAP PO's B2B features with a third-party's components — e.g., for trading-partner management) and an end-to-end monitoring capability.

SAP's road map for on-premises integration technology is, in many instances, aimed at catching up with industry leaders (e.g., in areas such as API management, trading-partner community management, MFT, REST support in SAP PO, SOAP over Java Message Service [JMS] and SaaS adapters), rather than at introducing innovations. For example, SAP hasn't yet articulated a strategy for supporting IoT integration.SeeburgerSeeburger is one of the major European integration vendors. It has established itself as a strong international player, mainly based on the quality of its technology (the intellectual property is completely owned by Seeburger) and sustained, reliable service for customers worldwide for more than 27 years. Its Business Integration Server (BIS) 6.5.1 (released in June 2013) is founded on a service bus, has orchestration functionality and contains a high-performance, any-to-any transformation engine mapping between an application specific format and XML, or EDI.Although Seeburger BIS is best-known for its support of B2B integration, it can also support A2A and cloud-to-on-premises integration projects. Seeburger BIS is the basis for the company's on-premises, cloud and managed services, enabling a hybrid integration platform option for its customers, when required. Combined with its certified industry solutions or professional service offerings, which create Seeburger-certified integration flows for its customers, Seeburger has gained a well-deserved reputation for quality. Improvements in deployment options have delivered a zero downtime platform that only enhances this reputation.Strengths

With more than 8,000 on-premises customers, plus users of its cloud and managed services, Seeburger is renowned for multienterprise B2B projects and its technology. Being developed entirely in-house, Seeburger technologies are well-integrated and stable.

Seeburger has added MFT technology (Seeburger File Exchange [See FX]) to BIS, which extends the A2A and B2B interaction styles that BIS supports.

By providing the same technology base for its on-premises integration, cloud and managed services, Seeburger provides migration paths among its offerings, as well as hybrid solutions when required, thus increasing the delivery options for its customers.

Seeburger has a particularly strong reputation for integrating SAP systems in A2A and B2B scenarios, providing the company with a large target market for its products.Cautions

Seeburger's exclusive focus on internally developed technology excellence has limited its ability to grow through technology acquisitions.

Although BIS contains an ESB, it is relatively new and not widely adopted as a stand-alone offering. Seeburger's future as an independent company continues to be the subject of speculation. Good

technologies typically survive acquisitions, but there is a higher-than-average risk of a change in company ownership.

Seeburger faces growing competition from IBM (Sterling B2B Integrator), Axway (which acquired Vordel), Oracle and SAP. A significant portion of Seeburger revenue is from its B2B partnership with SAP. SAP continues to promote Seeburger as a partner. However, SAP customers wanting to deploy a B2B gateway on-premises are finding that SAP is heavily promoting the technologies it obtained from the Crossgate and Ariba acquisitions for managed services.Software AGSoftware AG emerged as a notable application infrastructure middleware vendor through a combination of internal development and numerous acquisitions, including webMethods, IDS Scheer, Terracotta, my-Channels, JackBe, LongJump and Apama (from Progress Software). The application integration and SOA project markets have been strategic for Software AG since its early days as a middleware vendor, generating approximately 60% of the company's annual product revenue. This revenue comes primarily from direct sales in the U.S. (Software AG's largest market), EMEA, other countries in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, from the Asia/Pacific region. The key verticals for Software AG's on-premises integration platform are banking, insurance, government and transportation/logistics.The evaluation of Software AG's position in this Magic Quadrant is based on the functionality provided by the webMethods 9.6 family of products (released in April 2014). This includes webMethods Integration Server, supporting ESB and orchestration requirements; webMethods CloudStreams for cloud service integration; webMethods Mobile Suite for mobile app integration; webMethods Broker and webMethods Universal Messaging for MOM; webMethods Active Transfer for MFT; webMethods Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), providing process orchestration capabilities. The list also includes webMethods Trading Networks for B2B integration; webMethods Adapters; webMethods EntireX and ApplinX for mainframe integration; CentraSite for metadata management and application service governance; webMethods Mediator and webMethods Insight for application service governance; webMethods Designer for integration logic modeling and development; and webMethods Command Central for centralized administration and management.Strengths

The webMethods Suite is a comprehensive, advanced and proven application infrastructure product set for A2A, B2B, cloud service integration and mobile app integration projects. Some key characteristics of the webMethods Suite are a common runtime container, unified design and development tool, unified metadata management, common management platform, integrated business process/technical modeling through BPMN 2.0, native cloudiness (multitenancy and elastic scalability), universal messaging (supporting server, desktop, mobile and device connectivity), event processing and in-memory data grid.

The webMethods Suite installed base amounts to over 4,000 clients, worldwide. Clients leverage the technology in multiple usage scenarios, including large-scale and business-critical application integration and SOA deployments in multiple vertical markets and geographies.

Reference clients mention the platform stability/reliability, functional completeness and ease of development, and fast release migration as strengths for the platform.

Software AG's vision for the webMethods Suite addresses key application integration standards, technologies, deployment models and emerging requirements. The most notable planned improvements include OData support; API management functionality; business analytics; business user-friendly mapping tool; low latency, brokerless messaging; cloud services, mobile app and big data integration;

Software AG Integration Live; a PaaS rendition of its on-premises platform and support for in-memory computing, EDA and intelligent business operations.Cautions

Software AG integration technology revenue grew in 2013, although slower in some segments (application services governance and B2B gateway software) compared with the market and some of its traditional competitors. As most of the established vendors in this space, Software AG is facing increased competition from nimbler, and fast-growing OSS and iPaaS players that provide mature and low-cost-of-entry integration and SOA platforms.

Some organizations deem the webMethods Integration Platform unsuitable for supporting adaptive integration approaches and agile development methods (i.e., for projects of low to medium complexity, but with stringent time to value and continuously evolving requirements).

Some reference clients mentioned IT operation and integration with recently acquired technologies as areas that need improvement.

The 12-month road map for the platform doesn't address the emerging convergence of data and application integration requirements and doesn't include a strong value proposition for IoT (despite several relevant technology enablers already in Software AG's portfolio and some notable production deployments).TalendTalend, founded in 2006, is headquartered in Los Altos, California, and Suresnes, France. Initially focused on data integration technologies, Talend introduced application integration capabilities in 2010, and has a comprehensive integration suite. Talend provides three levels of integration capability, each with different costs and support models: (1) Talend Open Studio for ESB is based on an open-source license, is free of charge and has optional support available; (2) Talend Enterprise ESB has a commercial license and follows a subscription model with support included; and (3) Talend Platform for Enterprise Integration is a combination of Talend components, including data integration, application integration, data quality, service governance and BPM, all running on the Talend unified platform.During 2013 and early 2014, Talend provided a number of updates to its platform, including a new Data Mapper; enhancements to its SOA governance; improved integration between its ESB and BPM components; the ability to automate deployments to cloud, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(Amazon EC2); and a refresh to its open-source core components, such as Apache ActiveMQ, which includes AMQP and MQTT. All Talend products are integrated, and metadata is managed in a single repository.Talend pursues an open-core, commercial open-source model providing mission-critical features, support and maintenance via subscriptions. The company offers BPMS functionality via a partnership with Bonitasoft.Talend is the first vendor in this market to offer a platform that integrates a suite for application integration with data integration and BPM technologies through a common repository/environment.Strengths

Talend Open Studio for ESB is founded on the broadly adopted Apache CXF, Camel, Karaf and ActiveMQ open-source offerings, to which its engineers are active contributors.

Talend uses a graphical approach to implementing Apache Camel Enterprise Integration Patterns, which includes an all-in-one feature for testing the implementation of these enterprise integration patterns.

Talend's go-to-market approach is to offer five unique platforms—big data, data management, data services, enterprise integration and MDM — plus a single combined offering, Platform Universal. All the platforms are integrated via a single repository, differentiating Talend from many of its competitors. Its vision for a single platform for integration makes it one of the few vendors trying to realize the synergies between data and application integration.

Talend has a good understanding and vision of the integration space as a whole, reflected in the breadth of its offering and the product road map.Cautions

Talend is methodically expanding into its established markets (i.e., U.S. and EMEA) and opening up offices in Tokyo and Beijing in the Asia/Pacific region. However, it lacks a worldwide installed base comparable with the leading integration vendors.

Talend started as a data integration company and recently entered the ESB suite category. Talend provides strong support for REST; however, for API management, it relies on third-party API management products. This could rule Talend out by organizations with an API agenda, especially if they are expecting all that functionality as part of the Talend platform today.

Like most OSS-based vendors competing in this space, Talend has a share of the enterprise integration suite market of less than 1%, whereas the top five proprietary vendors hold 60% market share among them. There is a broad base of developers familiar with the underlying technologies.Tibco SoftwareTibco Software is a leading provider of integration middleware founded in 1997. During 2013, it garnered $239.7 million in ESB suite software license revenue, up from $223.0 million in 2012. This resulted in a 7.5% share of a $2.57 billion market (see "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2013"). Its portfolio of products for application integration includes Tibco ActiveMatrix Service Bus, Tibco ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks (AMBW), BusinessConnect, Tibco Foresight and Enterprise Message Service (EMS).A long-standing player in application integration, Tibco has improved AMBW, EMS and BusinessConnect. For example, its IDE supports the graphical development of WS-* and RESTful services, and the implementation of Web APIs. Tibco introduced ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Express, an integration platform for Web and mobile projects. To ramp up performance required by such projects, Tibco ActiveMatrix Service Grid is being used underneath its integration offerings. Tibco has embarked on efforts to simplify the user experience of its products so that its on-premises products can better compete with high-productivity iPaaS offerings.Beyond application integration, Tibco offers integrated, near-neighbor products to support BPM (e.g., ActiveMatrix BPM), CEP (e.g., Tibco BusinessEvents) and business activity monitoring activities (e.g., LiveView from the StreamBase acquisition). These offerings are supplemented by Silver Fabric, a cloud-management platform that has the potential to support a hybrid cloud integration scenario in which Silver Fabric can deploy and manage instances of BusinessWorks in private and public cloud environments.Strengths

Tibco exhibits excellent market presence, with $239.7 million in ESB suite software license revenue resulting in a 7.5% share of a $2.57 billion application integration suite market.

Tibco provides a comprehensive set of proven application integration products, with a modern, OSGi-compliant architecture. Typically, user solutions built with this product set are hosted in the innovative ActiveMatrix container technology. The product line is in-memory-computing-enabled by deploying Tibco ActiveSpaces, which is integrated with AMBW, EMS and other Tibco offerings.

Offerings that support near-neighbor activities, including the implementation of APIs (e.g., ActiveMatrix Policy Director and ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager), BPM and CEP are tightly integrated with Tibco's foundational application integration products, AMBW and EMS.

Tibco continues its investment in marketing integration through focused "waves" of content that typically run six to eight weeks, and are centered on key Integration topics. These waves include thought leadership whitepapers, webinars, videos and blogs.Cautions

Tibco developed AMBW Express for organizations such as SMBs, seeking simple solutions that go beyond "good enough" integration at a cost less than OSS offerings. Adoption of the products is not widespread. This may be due to SMBs' penchant for iPaaS offerings targeted at the citizen developer.

Tibco recognizes the importance of integration with IoT, and it has products that will help. However, it lacks IoT messaging that identifies those products and tells organizations the roles their current products should perform.

For enterprise license agreements (ELAs) Tibco collaborates with customers to establish the products and number of licenses that will be deployed. At the end of the ELA, deployed licenses are converted to perpetual licenses, and the organization owns all the Tibco licenses that have been deployed. Several Gartner clients have deployed more instances of the products than necessary to support their required integration, resulting in higher than expected support and maintenance charges and dissatisfied

customers. Prospects considering an ELA with Tibco must ensure the product units they plan to deploy are required.

Tibco continues with its commercial software license business model. AMBW is facing increasing competition from OSS ESB providers, but Tibco is yet to respond with competitive price alternatives (e.g., subscription-based pricing for AMBW). However, AMBW Express, which allows organizations to connect four applications with an unlimited number of services, is offered at $7,000 per processing core used in production.WSO2WSO2 offers an open-source platform that contains a broad range of application infrastructure and IT tools, including an enterprise integration platform suite and multiple related technologies. Its broad portfolio of capabilities contains components that are intentionally streamlined and somewhat minimalist in terms of functionality, eliminating infrequently used features and focusing on the needs of enterprise integration, and the deployment of newer applications and architectures.WSO2 adoption has been accelerating. More than 100 paying organizations use WSO2's integration capabilities, including some enterprises with high-scale IT projects and cloud service providers. (Note: This is only the count of the paying customers. More than 1,000 organizations have downloaded the open-source code and are using it unsupported and unaccounted for.) The majority of the company's integration software business is in North America, with some in EMEA and other regions. WSO2 headquarters are in the U.K. and Sri Lanka, where it maintains offshore development and support.Its offerings relevant to integration projects include WSO2 API Manager 1.6.0, WSO2 Business Process Server 3.2.0, WSO2 Business Rules Server 2.0.0, WSO2 ESB 4.8.1, WSO2 Message Broker 2.1.0, WSO2 Governance Registry 4.6.0, WSO2 Business Activity Monitor 2.4.0, WSO2 CEP 3.0.0 and WSO2 Application Server 5.2.1. The software is largely based on Apache projects (notably, the WSO2 ESB is based on Apache Synapse). All the components of the WSO2 suite are available under an open-source license, which results in a significant percentage of users operating without support agreements and without generating revenue for WSO2 (a common case with open-source software).Strengths

All open-source technology supports the perception of lower vendor lock-in, greater openness and lower costs, which are attractive characteristics for many mainstream organizations. Adoption by Apache of some core WSO2 technology (Stratos) further enhances its standing as the open technology platform.

A broad portfolio of capabilities related to integration — including support of streams, CEP, API management, multiple options in mobile, process management and data integration, extensible connector architecture, plus its native private and public cloud capabilities — support customers' long-term planning for increasingly advanced and demanding integration infrastructure. These form a basis for long-term relationships with customers, adding to the company's viability.

Some advanced use cases, including IoT and Web-scale volumes, demonstrate the modern nature of the internal architecture of WSO2 OSGi-based technology suite and the ability of the company to track the fast-changing market. Prospects and customers in the leading edge of business and technology innovation require these features.

A cloud-based development and operations platform (WSO2 App Factory) enables organizations to reduce capital costs of on-premises integration projects by offloading development and testing new solutions to a "rented space" in the cloud. It can also be a basis for hybrid integration infrastructure and provides a natural evolution road map for integration strategy planners.Cautions

Although the company has shown good growth during the past 12 months, it has the resources and market share of an early player. Open-source competitors are improving execution and developing strong name recognition. Closed-source competitors are expanding to cloud, mobile and other modern use scenarios. Building a share in this market is a challenge for WSO2.

WSO2's focus on IT developers limits its ability to attract mainstream enterprise customers, as some of the focus in adoption of integration solutions extends from systematic central IT projects to include line of business (LOB) adaptive integration and citizen integration. This new audience is looking for high user productivity and prebuilt integration for popular endpoints. Targeting LOB prospects can be a challenge to the organization accustomed to targeting central IT developers.

A simplified approach to B2B integration focused on API interaction works well for some customers' requirements. A multienterprise business remains highly strategic and central to many mainstream enterprises. Limited support for this use case can reduce market share for WSO2, despite its innovations elsewhere. A focus on modern use cases in systems of innovation is essential, but underserving the established architectures in systems of record can be a challenge to the company.

Vendors Added and DroppedWe review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.AddedInfor was added to this Magic Quadrant because it qualified on required functionality and revenue.DroppedAurea was dropped from this Magic Quadrant because it shifted from selling application infrastructure to vertical solutions using its infrastructure.Honorable MentionThe following vendors are not included in this research because they are small (less than $15 million in revenue) or do not meet other inclusion criteria. However, they are appropriate for certain situations and sometimes compete against the vendors that are covered in this Magic Quadrant:

AdroitLogic (www.adroitlogic.org) is a privately owned company providing support and maintenance for a variety of open-source technologies, including UltraESB, a Java-based ESB.

LogiCoy (www.logicoy.com) is a privately owned company providing support and maintenance for a variety of open-source technologies, including OpenESB, a Java-based ESB.

Magic Software Enterprises (www.magicsoftware.com) is a public company providing a variety of platforms, including the Magic xpi Integration Platform.

Neudesic (www.neudesic.com) is a privately owned company providing system integration services and Neuron ESB, a .NET-based ESB.

Inclusion and Exclusion CriteriaVendors included in this Magic Quadrant must have sufficient technology and expertise in their portfolios (regardless of packaging) to be sole application infrastructure providers for all types of systematic application integration projects. Following are the key technical characteristics that are essential to such offerings.Communications: Vendor offerings must implement an interoperability layer that supports interactions among application and system components via a variety of protocols, including HTTP/plain old XML (POX), REST, SOAP, Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP), MQTT, .NET remoting, MOM and file transfer. Vendor offerings must enable a broad array of interaction styles, such as request/reply, conversation, publish and subscribe, and asynchronous messaging. Vendor offerings should support the idempotent delivery of messages: (1) guarantee the delivery of each message; (2) deliver each message only once; and (3) deliver messages in the order sent by the source program(s).Data Transformation: Vendor offerings should support the translation of data from the format, structure and semantics native to the source application to that required by the target applications. Offerings are assessed on the basis of support for vertical protocol standards (for example, SWIFT, Health Level Seven [HL7], ACORD and National Council for Prescription Drug Programs [NCPDP]) and communications protocol standards (for example, Applicability Statement 1 [AS1], AS2, AS3, electronic business message service specification (ebMS) and RosettaNet Implementation Framework [RNIF]).Orchestration: Vendors should provide technology that hosts the execution of process logic spanning interactions with multiple back-end services or applications with the aim of implementing composite services or automated system-to-system processes. Typically, these orchestrations enable short-term processes (i.e., processes that complete within seconds or minutes). In some cases, these processes may run for hours, days or even weeks. Process state should be maintained for the duration of the logical unit of work (for example, for an entire RosettaNet partner interface process). This technology usually

provides only basic support for human-based activities, primarily aimed at exception handling and error recovery.Application Connectivity: Vendors should provide an array of adapters or wrappers — i.e., technology that combines design tools and runtime software to implement programs that act as "glue," bridging protocol differences and connecting to databases, as well as popular packaged applications and SaaS offerings.Development Environment: Each vendor must provide a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to enable integration staff to efficiently design, implement, test and deploy integration interfaces and service interfaces.B2B Interactions: Vendors should provide connection provisioning capabilities for B2B protocols, such as AS2, EDI and ebMS. Vendors should support Web services-based connections with external business partners. Support for trading-partner management and partner self-provisioning is expected.Governance: Governance is the assignment of decision rights to ensure desirable behavior. Vendor support is expected for managing the life cycle of integration solutions during design time and to manage qualities of service at runtime. Expected functionality includes a registry/repository, policy definition and management, and API management.Security: Vendors should implement effective security support to enable capabilities such as authentication of endpoints, authorization of service or interface access, message/document encryption/decryption, digital signature processing, message/service invocation logging, and token/certificate management.Administration and Monitoring: Vendors should provide technology that enables visibility into, and effective management of, the solutions that are created through the integration of programs and services.This Magic Quadrant considers only products that are available for implementation on user-controlled infrastructures. This could be traditional data center infrastructure or private cloud deployments, as well as hosted (and possibly public) IaaS environments. This Magic Quadrant does not consider platforms that are available only as cloud service offerings.Vendors that limit themselves to serving a single vertical market may be suitable for organizations in those industries, but are not covered in this Magic Quadrant. Qualifying vendors must have significant revenue from multiple vertical markets.Each vendor's entire set of product offerings is considered, without regard to product packaging. The vendor must deliver and support all the capabilities just described. Some of the technology in the evaluated portfolio might be repackaged from a third party. This is acceptable as long as the user's primary support experience is with the vendor being assessed. Delegating Level 3 support is acceptable.There must be evidence of production success (at least 30 paying production customers) by the vendor as a sole provider of technology for this project type.Vendors with annual product license and maintenance revenue of more than $15 million from application infrastructure deployments may be considered for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant. In the case of vendors pursuing a subscription-based, open-source business model, the threshold for consideration is $10 million in annual product subscription revenue.Vendors must realize substantial revenue from at least two of five global regions: North America, Latin America, EMEA, the Asia/Pacific region.This Magic Quadrant evaluates 17 vendors that offer the greatest and broadest market penetration for on-premises application integration suites, and meet all the functional inclusion criteria noted above.

Evaluation CriteriaAbility to ExecuteGartner analysts evaluate technology providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods and/or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively impact revenue, retention and reputation. Ultimately, technology providers are judged on their ability and success in capitalizing on their vision.

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Overall Viability Low

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record High

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Source: Gartner (July 2014)

Completeness of VisionGartner analysts evaluate technology providers on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements about market direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive forces, and how well these statements map to the relevant Gartner position. Ultimately, technology providers are rated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunities for the provider.

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Medium

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Source: Gartner (July 2014)

Quadrant DescriptionsLeadersLeaders in the Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites are vendors with a proven, comprehensive and integrated set of products that customers use for projects such as A2A, B2B, cloud-to-on-premises and cloud-to-cloud integration. They have a large installed base of products. Leaders can cross-sell their integration solutions, and have demonstrated their ability to anticipate technology and market trends by extending their offerings to support the data consistency, multistep process and composite application integration styles that occur in systematic integration projects. They also have a sizable installed base of international clients, many of which demonstrate their satisfaction by periodically upgrading to new product versions.Optimally, Leaders support a bimodal approach (systematic and adaptive) to application integration. They provide a comprehensive ESB suite offering, as well as the ability to integrate that offering with relevant technologies (including community management, data integration, SOA and integration governance, and BPM). Leaders demonstrate a strong commitment to this market through focused value propositions and go-to-market strategies (for example, by packaging platforms and/or by providing integrated product and service offerings specific for this market). Leaders must support the most relevant industry standards — for example, SOAP-based and RESTful Web services, BPEL, BPMN and OSGi — and offer a well-defined product road map addressing most of the emerging requirements, such as cloud/SaaS integration.

Established leadership (achieved through organic growth or acquisitions) in the adjacent application platform infrastructure market is a common trait among application integration Leaders. This, in part, reflects some commonality in the technology required in application hosting and application integration usage scenarios. Leadership also is a consequence of the logical progression of the most advanced users having adopted a systematic approach to application integration to selecting a shared approach to SOA infrastructure. Consequently, organizations that endorsed one of the Leaders' platforms to support their systematic application integration projects find it natural and nondisruptive to adopt the same platform (or some extensions and/or variants) to also support their SOA infrastructure requirements.The offerings of the Leaders are rich and mature. Despite the efforts of most Leaders to devise entry-level versions of their technologies, their products are sometimes considered too complex or too expensive for organizations with minimal experience in systematic application integration, or for businesses that are budget-constrained or looking for a focused, fast-to-deploy and easy-to-use platform.ChallengersChallengers are vendors that have demonstrated that their technology can support the implementation of numerous large business integration projects and have built platforms capable of effectively competing against, and often besting, those of the Leaders. These vendors are followers, rather than leaders, in providing innovative features, or their innovations are limited to a specific problem. Some vendors in the Challengers quadrant do not focus on marketing messages, value propositions or comprehensive geographic coverage. Challengers have the opportunity to become Leaders through greater product innovation, combined with a marketing and sales focus on all aspects of application integration (A2A, B2B and cloud-based applications).VisionariesVisionaries demonstrate innovation from product and technology perspectives. They have significant investments in integration technology, and their prospects for survival and growth depend on their ability to establish a strong presence in the market for application integration. Some large Visionaries have relatively small installed bases for their products. In some cases, their production readiness is not yet proven by a full spectrum of mission-critical deployments.Through diligent and focused execution, some Visionaries may become Leaders. However, limited sales, marketing, engineering and support resources create enormous obstacles for such ambitions. Many of these vendors are likely to be acquired by larger companies, but some offer excellent and highly innovative products that, at times (often, in particular use-case scenarios), will outperform large vendors' offerings.Often, products from vendors in the Visionaries quadrant can be used with point products from other vendors to create a comprehensive middleware infrastructure that has all the features offered by the one-stop-shopping suites of the large vendors in the Leaders quadrant.Niche PlayersA Niche Player often offers good, or even excellent, integration technology. However, sometimes the focus of that Niche Player on a specific vertical market has resulted in products that are less useful in integration problems outside that niche domain. Alternatively, a vendor may lack focus on this problem space, which, for it, is a marginal business. Vendors positioned in the Niche Players quadrant have limited sales, marketing and support resources, or are committed to only one geography or installed base.Nevertheless, application integration technology from a Niche Player can be an optimal choice for specific classes of users (for example, in a particular vertical market where the vendor's integration technology is focused, or in the geography where the vendor is located). Additionally, Leaders' and Challengers' products are often too complex and expensive for SMBs, or for companies whose requirements are not overly demanding. Companies with less-stringent requirements may find suitable products from Niche Players and Visionaries.A vendor in the Niche Players quadrant could emerge as a Visionary through a greater commitment to innovation and focus on on-premises application integration suites.

ContextThere are two macro trends and drivers, Nexus of Forces and digital business, which will increase use of on-premises application integration suite offerings.

In 2011, Gartner identified four forces that would have a dramatic effect on the way businesses operate: the cloud, mobility, social networking and the explosion in information (see "Re-Imagine IT Using Insights From Symposium's Analyst Keynote" — Note: This document has been archived; some of its content may not reflect current conditions). Taken individually, each force is innovative and disruptive. Taken together, they heighten the importance of the Nexus of Forces. This Nexus of Forces continues to revolutionize business; and will continue to shape how organizations evolve their use of IT.The Nexus of Forces will increase the types of integration to:

Connect SaaS applications with on-premises applications Evolve the way applications manage APIs to facilitate connecting to external endpoints, including mobile

apps and trading partners Connect to social Web properties accessing customer data to facilitate sentiment analysis Ensure application integration platforms are able to deal with the huge increases in the volume, variety

and velocity of informationIn "Get Ready for Digital Business With the Digital Business Development Path," Gartner defines digital business as the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds. It promises to usher in an unprecedented convergence of people, business and things that disrupts existing business models — even those born of the Internet, e-business and digital marketing eras. By 2020, more than 7 billion people and businesses, and at least 35 billion devices, will be connected to the Internet. With people, businesses and things communicating, transacting and even negotiating with one another, a new world comes into being — the world of digital business. Businesses that succeed in this new and disruptive world will be the ones that can capture the combined power of people, businesses and things by picturing how new value is created. To capture that power, IT will be required to encompass endpoints that are in the IoT.Digital business will increase the amount and types of integration to:

Gather events from the IoT Connect to CEP technology to process base events into aggregates that decision makers can consume

easily Connect to real-time analytics that display the aggregations in a manner that enables decision makers to

make considered, but fast, decisions Convey events that invoke automated responses to events, when appropriate

During the next 12 months, directors of integration and other IT leaders who need to tackle a variety of integration requirements should look at the providers in this Magic Quadrant when:

Supporting a bimodal (systematic and adaptive) approach to application integration Looking for technology to support mission-critical interfaces Planning to complement on-premises integration middleware with iPaaS offerings targeting cloud service

integration, mobile app integration (MAI) and API requirements in the context of an integration strategy holistically supporting traditional systematically oriented and agile integration requirements

Market OverviewApplication integration technology burst into the middleware market in the mid-1990s. At that time, sophisticated integration products were offered exclusively by specialists — vendors that provided application integration technology. Initially termed "message brokers," the products from these vendors focused on providing a graphical approach to specifying the business logic required to transform and intelligently route data among applications to achieve data consistency. From 1999 through 2001, IBM and Microsoft entered the application integration market, where they have since been joined by Oracle, SAP and Fujitsu and others.As the popularity of SOA applications began to grow, ESB technology was introduced to mediate interactions between consumers and services. The products offered by application integration vendors evolved in the same manner — adding features (in the form of services) that resulted in a comprehensive suite. Ultimately, due to growing functional overlap, the two markets (SOA and application integration) merged.Specialists' offerings continue to be the most innovative, with megavendors being fast followers. Although specialists sometimes outmaneuver megavendors through innovations such as BPM tools, business activity monitoring features and CEP capabilities, megavendors counter by sowing fear,

uncertainty and doubt (FUD) about the viability of small vendors. Eventually, megavendors match the innovation of specialists through internal development or acquisition. Today, megavendors and specialists are expanding sales to provide one-stop shopping for a broad set of assets complementary to application infrastructure (such as solutions, services, patterns and templates) and that add significant value to organizations involved in SOA, API, BPM and CEP initiatives.As the popularity of application integration rose, interest in B2B collaboration also rose. Many companies became disenchanted with the cost of private, proprietary EDI value-added network (VAN) services. They began seeking software alternatives that provided community management and secure, message-based transport over TCP/IP networks and the Internet, and that now expose services that allow trading partners to transact business in a more timely and efficient manner compared with exchanging documents.Until the past few years, users tended to implement integration projects for A2A and B2B projects separately; however, users are increasingly looking for a consolidated integration solution to A2A and B2B problems. Thus, three important trends have driven the consolidation of internal and external integration project styles onto this version of the application integration Magic Quadrant:

Application infrastructure vendors have extended their portfolios to include products that support integration with external endpoints.

Vendors of B2B products are extending their portfolios to include products that support A2A integration. Enterprises are consolidating disparate B2B integration and application integration initiatives, which

includes technologies, best practices and governance.Open-source offerings continue a three-year trend of growing at rates greater than their closed-source competitors. Thus, the application integration suite market is mature. In 2014, ESB suites, a foundational feature in application integration suites, are no longer included in the Hype Cycle for Application Infrastructure. This means that more than 50% of the target audience has adopted ESB suites. Nevertheless, new offers continue to emerge and consolidation continues.The hype around application integration and SOA has moved on to initiatives that have gained popularity and marketing hype. Examples include the API economy, digital business, the IoT and the mobile imperative. The dynamics associated with these megatrends will drive the need for application integration suites to add features, advancing the market and causing the technologies assessed in this Magic Quadrant to remain foundational for these new endeavors

Small & Midsize (<1000 Employees) Context  26 August 2014

Analyst(s): Jess Thompson

Midmarket enterprises need application integration functionality that supports a variety of integration patterns. We examine vendors with on-premises products that support those patterns while addressing midmarket considerations for technology selection.

Market DifferentiatorsOfferings: Functionality is packaged to support and scale to the requirements of midsize business projects. This protects midsize organizations from having to purchase packages (or, in the case of open-source software [OSS] offerings, purchase support and maintenance for a package) that contains more than the required functionality.Vendors: Business model supports sales that do not require the capital expense of software licenses. Land and expand is still an objective, but the landing can be one license. For example, a developer pulls down (from an OSS community or OSS enterprise service bus [ESB] provider), investigates the offering, and then begins the process of selling it within the business.Ease of use: Today, several offerings don't require a professional developer to implement an interface. For some offerings, interface flows are graphically assembled from a set of artifacts and, when complete, can be executed without further effort. No programming is required. This enables interfaces to be completed by "citizen integrators" — i.e., users operating outside enterprise IT and its governance that

use composition to create new interfaces that integrate applications. This is a benefit for midsize organizations that lack application development and integration skills.Ease of configuration and operation: Although the situation is improving, some application integration offerings are difficult to configure and require dedicated resources to support their operation. Offerings for midsize organizations must be easy to install and configure. They also must minimize the number of resources required to support the operation.

Considerations for Technology and Service SelectionThis research is based on the responses to a survey sent to providers to inquire about their participation in the midmarket:

Products built for midmarket resources:o Easy to install, configure, manage and integrate with existing systemso Flexible deployment optionso The user experience supports adaptive development and citizen integratorso Available packaged integrating processes — solutions that significantly lower the cost of developing an

interfaceo Minimizes staffing required to support operations Affordability:o Lower capital costso Alternatives to capital expenditure, such as subscription-based pricing

Comparing Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Vendors, 201428 February 2014 ID:G00248985

Analyst(s): Ross Altman, Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Kimihiko Iijima, Jess Thompson

VIEW SUMMARY

Simple IT projects may only need integration middleware or an application server. Leaders of more complex application projects that need comprehensive application infrastructure to support integration, service-oriented architecture and composite applications will find guidance here.

OverviewKey Findings

For some IT projects, it can be better to source all integration, development and runtime technology from a single vendor, presuming that product integration and support will be better if the product set is sourced from a single vendor.

The feature set for comprehensive application infrastructure suites is the superset of the capabilities of on-premises application integration suites and on-premises application platforms.

Many of the components of an overall application development, deployment and integration suite are selected by different parts of the enterprise. As a result, IT organizations generally end up dependent on multiple vendors that don't cooperate to enable the integration of their tools and middleware.

Some IT organizations believe, often incorrectly, that they can determine the products that are truly best of breed in each product category, and then effectively integrate these products at both design time and runtime.

Recommendations Use Gartner's on-premises application infrastructure provider Magic Quadrants to better understand the

strengths and challenges of both specialist vendors and providers of comprehensive application infrastructure software.

When IT project requirements are more limited in scope, use the Magic Quadrant associated with the type of application integration or service-oriented architecture (SOA) development project.

When IT project requirements are more broad in scope, use this research to evaluate the relative strengths and challenges of vendors that offer comprehensive suites of application infrastructure products.TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Analysis o Vendor Selection Methods o The Market for Comprehensive Application Infrastructure

Fujitsu Strengths Cautions IBM Strengths Cautions InterSystems Strengths Cautions Microsoft Strengths Cautions Oracle Strengths Cautions Red Hat Strengths Cautions SAP

Strengths Cautions Tibco Software Strengths Cautions WSO2 Strengths Cautions o Bottom Line

TABLES

Table 1.

Vendors of Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Suites

FIGURES

Figure 1.

The Feature Set for Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Suites Is the Superset of Application Integration Suites and Application Platforms

AnalysisApplication infrastructure is the category of technology that enables communications between and within applications. These products also act as the layer between business applications and the underlying system resources and operating system. When development tools are not considered, this infrastructure is often referred to as "middleware." Although many smaller technology categories constitute this application infrastructure, the key components are:

Application execution containers (i.e., application servers) Front-end containers and user interaction tools (e.g., portals and rich Internet application [RIA] tools) Application integration and composition tools (e.g., enterprise service bus [ESB] suites, business process

management [BPM] suites, business rules management systems [BRMS] and B2B gateways) Application management and governance products (e.g., SOA gateways and service registries to control

and manage runtime access to services, and repositories and tools for the development and life cycle management of services and policies)At least some of these application infrastructure components underlie every application, enabling execution of the application and integration with other applications and data. In some cases, the project team begins with a "greenfield," so it can select whatever products it wants to enable its applications. In other cases, some or all of the project's required middleware capabilities are "inherited" from an enterprise reference architecture, from previous projects or as a feature of the enterprise's ERP product. In any event, it's critical that the team fully understand the capabilities and limitations of the application infrastructure products and product providers that it will rely on to support its applications.

Vendor Selection MethodsThere are several different approaches for selecting application infrastructure (see Note 1):

Select best-of-breed products on a project-by-project basis. Select best-of-breed products on an enterprisewide basis. Select a single vendor's product set for each type of application development or integration project. Select a single vendor's product set for all enterprise application development and integration.

Each of these vendor selection methods corresponds to a specific market, where vendors compete to be selected by IT organizations or IT projects. To assist clients in their selection process, Gartner offers a

market evaluation model in the form of a Magic Quadrant (see "How Gartner Evaluates Vendors and Markets in Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes").To support the best-of-breed vendor selection model, Gartner offers Magic Quadrants for specific technical markets, such as enterprise application servers (see "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers"), portal products (see "Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products"), BPM suites (see "Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites") and many others. (Note: These three research documents have been archived; some of their content may not reflect current conditions.)To support vendor selection of application middleware with broader capabilities, Gartner identified vendors that offer broad product suites focused on the recognized markets for application development and application integration capabilities, and published two corresponding Magic Quadrants in June 2013:

For clients focused on the acquisition of on-premises products to enable the development and deployment of systematic SOA applications, we offer the "Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Platforms."

For clients focused on the acquisition of on-premises products to enable the systematic and comprehensive integration of multiple, diverse applications and data sources, we offer the "Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites."Each of the product offerings in these two markets, to some degree, depends on a shared set of application infrastructure features. However, each of these markets also has an additional set of key requirements, and the products in each of these markets use the shared application infrastructure foundation differently. Thus, these Magic Quadrants are essentially two lenses focused on much the same technology space, with each lens representing the requirements for a different type of project (see Figure 1).Figure 1. The Feature Set for Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Suites Is the Superset of Application Integration Suites and Application Platforms

Source: Gartner (February 2014)A number of our clients need to see an analysis of this superset of the on-premises application integration and platform markets because of the complex product choices they must make. These clients often manage large projects that involve both new development and integration with existing legacy and packaged applications. Such projects may have requirements such as:

Integration with legacy and older packaged applications to process orders and payments. These existing applications may offer standard or nonstandard APIs. This integration will almost certainly require data transformation.

Integration with B2B partners to enable inventory replenishment. This integration could be performed via file transfer, messaging or Web services. This integration will also likely require data transformation.

Management of multiple business processes to enable customer support or installation scheduling. Integration with mobile apps via Web services-based APIs to enable customer interaction and/or

interaction with workers in the field (e.g., delivery and installation personnel).This research regarding comprehensive application infrastructure vendors synthesizes and integrates our analysis of the capabilities of the key vendors from our two June 2013 Magic Quadrants. We will fully

revisit these individual markets later in 2014 with a refresh of the Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Platforms and a Market Guide for On-Premises Application Integration Suites.

The Market for Comprehensive Application InfrastructureTo qualify as a strategic partner and long-term provider of application development and integration infrastructure, a vendor must support both of the project types defined above. A vendor may also need to provide other functionality, as determined by your organization (e.g., a database management system [DBMS] or a mobile application development platform).To help users select a single vendor for both application development and integration projects, we have combined the results of the Magic Quadrants in Table 1.

Vendor (Headquarters)

Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites

Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Platforms

Fujitsu (Japan) Challenger Challenger

IBM (U.S.) Leader Leader

InterSystems (U.S.) Niche Player Niche Player

Microsoft (U.S.) Leader Leader

Oracle (U.S.) Leader Leader

Red Hat (U.S.) Niche Player Leader

SAP (Germany) Challenger Visionary

Tibco Software (U.S.) Leader Visionary

WSO2 (U.S.) Visionary Visionary

Table 1. Vendors of Comprehensive Application Infrastructure Suites

Source: Gartner (February 2014)We have listed only those vendors that qualified for both Magic Quadrants. IBM, Microsoft and Oracle were rated as Leaders in both markets. Some other vendors were also rated the same in both markets (Fujitsu as a Challenger, InterSystems as a Niche Player and WSO2 as a Visionary). The rest of the vendors were rated differently in the two markets.Many of the vendors in Table 1 have been players in the application integration and platform markets for more than a decade, and have been mainstays on the relevant Gartner Magic Quadrants. There are, however, two relatively recent phenomena that are having an impact on this market.The availability of open-source software (OSS) vendors with broad-enough product offerings to earn a place on this chart (Red Hat and WSO2) is noteworthy. Given their notably lower licensing and support fees, the OSS middleware vendors are having an impact on the business dynamics of this market (see "Who's Who Among Providers of Enterprise Service Bus Open-Source Software").The availability of cloud-based platform as a service (PaaS) offerings is also disrupting these markets (see "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service" and "Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service"). The per-use pricing, immediate provisioning of capabilities and elasticity of these cloud services are all attractive to enterprises that would have otherwise bought more licenses for on-premises software.Following, we have created basic profiles of the vendors that would qualify to provide most of the on-premises application infrastructure for an organization's application projects during the next three to five years. Of course, there can be many reasons why having multiple vendors may best serve your company's needs, so we do not simplistically recommend making such a choice mandatory for all projects. Instead, we recommend establishing a policy for approving project-level deviations from the preferred vendor. We identify such an approach to rationalizing infrastructure to support your integration project needs in "2013 Strategic Road Map for Integration."Except for Microsoft, all the listed comprehensive application infrastructure vendors have made a strategic commitment to the Java programming model. Although all the Java vendors support some additional languages, and most are relaxing their exclusive use of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) programming model, they will likely be unsuitable as long-term strategic technology providers

for companies that intentionally avoid using Java. On the other hand, Microsoft is strategically committed to Windows platform technology, and companies that want to avoid Windows will not find Microsoft a suitable strategic partner. Of course, a vendor that does not qualify as a broad, multiproject strategic partner may be the best choice for some application infrastructure projects, or as a provider of part of the infrastructure when an enterprise is pursuing a best-of-breed approach.FujitsuFujitsu offers application infrastructure middleware — the Interstage product family — as well as hardware, business applications (vertical-packaged and custom-developed applications) and various services (system integration, outsourcing, cloud). This evaluation is primarily based on the functionality provided by Fujitsu's Interstage products:

Interstage Application Server Interstage Business Application Server Interstage eXtreme Transaction Processing Server Interstage Big Data Complex Event Processing Server (which includes a Java EE-application server, in-

memory data grid [IMDG], complex-event processing, object-relational mapping and load-balancing capabilities)

Interstage XWand Interstage Service Integrator Interstage Business Process Manager Interstage Business Operations Platform (supporting ESB and orchestration requirements)

Our research also considered: Interstage Interaction Manager Interstage AR Processing Server Interstage Mobile Application Server (which provides front-end container capabilities for mobile devices) Interstage Studio (providing a modeling and development toolset) Interstage Application Development Cycle Manager Systemwalker Service Catalog Manager Systemwalker Centric Manager Systemwalker Service Quality Coordinator (for administration, monitoring and management)

Interstage Terracotta BigMemory Max and Interstage Terracotta Web Sessions were added to the Fujitsu Interstage product line after the analysis was conducted for this research.Strengths

The Fujitsu product suite (including a common development toolset, an integrated modeling and composing environment, management environment, metadata services, and runtime platform) supports development of large-scale, mission-critical applications, such as stock-exchange trading.

The Fujitsu Interstage products are available on-premises and as cloud services. They represent the primary supporting engine for Fujitsu's system integration business and solution (packaged application) revenue. Revenue from the Interstage product line places Fujitsu among the top 10 application infrastructure software vendors (see "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012").

Fujitsu provides a comprehensive and integrated set of application infrastructure offerings for the development of systematic applications, as well as application integration technologies for more opportunistic projects.

Fujitsu recently enhanced Interstage Information Integrator, Fujitsu's data integration tool, which enables high-speed data transfer and high-performance data transformation (patent pending) with GUI-based data flow processing and mapping definition.

Recently, several new products (e.g., Interstage AR Processing Server and Interstage Mobile Application Server) have been introduced to advance Fujitsu's vision of a human-centric intelligent society. These products provide innovative user experiences by combining real-world objects and information.Cautions

Fujitsu Interstage business revenue comes primarily from Japanese enterprises inside and outside Japan, making it particularly sensitive to business conditions in the Japanese economy. Also, revenue relies substantially on Fujitsu's system integration and hardware businesses.

Fujitsu has not been successful in effectively conveying its capabilities to the broad application platform market. The vast majority of application platform product evaluation efforts around the world proceed without significant awareness of Fujitsu's presence in this market.

Fujitsu does not offer a distinct high-performance messaging product. Fujitsu's current mobile and social offering is narrower in scope and has fewer features than the leading

players in the application platform market.IBMIn the mainframe era, IBM, with its broadly used IMS and CICS transaction-processing monitors, was the dominant vendor of application platform middleware. By leveraging that market position, it has been able to retain a leadership position as the application platform market transitioned to Web-based systems. Its Java-based WebSphere Application Server is one of the most popular and most widely deployed application servers.In the application integration middleware market, IBM has been a player since the early 1990s, when it introduced IBM MQSeries (now IBM WebSphere MQ) message-oriented middleware (MOM). Since then, IBM has been expanding its offerings in this market, through acquisitions (e.g., Cast Iron Systems and Sterling Commerce) and via internal development.During 2012, IBM further expanded its product line with the objective of supporting an increasing volume of work taking place on mobile devices and in the cloud, and providing deeper insights with offerings that can be assembled into a platform for intelligent business operations.The portfolio of products considered to assess IBM's position includes items that belong to the WebSphere family and other product lines. The most relevant are:

WebSphere Application Server for the back-end container IBM Integration Bus Advanced (formerly WebSphere Message Broker) WebSphere DataPower Integration Appliance XI52, which provides ESB capabilities WebSphere DataPower B2B Appliance XB62, which offers B2B gateway features WebSphere DataPower Service Gateway XG45, which offers SOA gateway functionality WebSphere MQ Advanced for MOM WebSphere Business Monitor, which provides business activity monitoring WebSphere eXtreme Scale and WebSphere DataPower XC10 Appliance for IMDG and caching WebSphere Cast Iron for cloud services integration IBM Business Process Manager Standard for orchestration and business process management IBM Worklight for mobile integration WebSphere Portal for user experience management WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) and WebSphere DataPower Service Gateway XG45

appliance for application service governance IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management for administration, monitoring and management IBM Workload Deployer for elastic application infrastructure deployment IBM PureApplication System IBM Rational Asset Manager, IBM Rational Software Architect, IBM Rational Application Developer for

WebSphere Software, and IBM Rational Team Concert for modeling and developmentStrengths

IBM's global reach; large and loyal application platform software installed base; synergy with other IBM software offerings (e.g., embedding WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere eXtreme Scale into a large number of IBM software products); large talent pool of experienced users and partners; and professional services organization's strengths are all factors favoring IBM's application platform technology adoption by large, mainstream enterprises, especially in vertical industries characterized by a strong presence of IBM mainframes.

IBM has a comprehensive product line that addresses application development and integration requirements, including offerings such as WebSphere MQ, IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere DataPower appliances, Sterling B2B Integrator and Sterling Connect:Direct, WebSphere Cast Iron, and fit-for-purpose offerings addressing specific requirements (such as cloud integration) and vertical B2B solutions (such as Sterling Order Management and Sterling Configure, Price, Quote). These offerings are sustained through massive partner programs and are complemented by a range of consulting and professional services

options. Over the years, IBM has accumulated significant deployment successes for large and business-critical application integration projects in multiple vertical sectors and in virtually all geographical areas, especially in the IBM mainframe installed base.

Advanced capabilities — such as an IMDG, advanced batch processing, intelligent management, private cloud deployments and support for dynamic languages, mobile applications, Web 2.0 and social applications — make the IBM application platform technology family attractive to large organizations looking for a standards-based platform to support an extended range of functional and nonfunctional requirements that go beyond the capabilities that traditional application servers provide.

IBM's "patterns of expertise" enable automated application deployment and elastic scaling of any enterprise application (not just Java EE). IBM's pattern deployment engine is available through IBM Workload Deployer and stand-alone software in SmartCloud Orchestrator, and built into the IBM PureApplication System. The vendor also plans to offer it on the newly acquired SoftLayer public cloud environment.

IBM's strategy is to balance its portfolio of systematically oriented technologies with a set of open-source/open-standards-based, productivity-oriented cloud platforms, which are currently in technical preview under the "BlueMix" moniker. This is an indication of the vendor's commitment to remain a key player in the Nexus-era application infrastructure market.

IBM has invested in a large number of marketing initiatives and vertical and horizontal solutions (for example, Smarter Cities, Smarter Commerce, Smarter Oil and Gas, and Smarter Banking) containing process templates and integration frameworks that are driving adoption of IBM's application infrastructure products within a variety of use cases.

At Impact, IBM's annual user conference, the vendor left no doubt that an emphasis will be placed on the offerings provided for the integration of operational technology in general, and specifically on bring-your-own-device initiatives that require support of mobile app development, mobile app deployment and management, and the integration of mobile apps with on-premises-based business logic and data.Cautions

The implementation of large-scale application projects may require the acquisition and deployment of several IBM products (18 products were considered during the assessment of IBM). The total cost of the set necessary for a client's projects will vary, based on the number of products required. However, that cost can be very high, and integrating multiple products to create the infrastructure required for a project may create the need for a significant amount of professional services to get those multiple products up and running, configured, and working together to address the user organization's requirements.

The pace of IBM's acquisitions in the application infrastructure space continuously challenges the vendor with product rationalization and positioning issues; at times, this will expose users to product discontinuity and/or migration problems.

Despite plans to rationalize and simplify the product portfolio (for example, in the ESB space), the fine-grained differences, functional overlaps and product integration challenges among products — such as choosing from among IBM Integration Bus, WebSphere Cast Iron, and the WebSphere Data Power XG45, XI52 and XB62 appliances to address integration requirements — make it difficult for potential users to determine the best fit for their requirements.

In 2012, IBM application server revenue grew significantly slower than in 2011 (5.5% versus 22.1%). Moreover, revenue growth was negative (−5.3%) in portal products and, in the key ESB segment, the company grew significantly slower than in 2012 (2.8% versus 24.7%). Although these results are in line with Oracle's, its traditional competitor in application infrastructure, IBM's slowdown reflects intensified competition from traditional players, stronger effectiveness of open-source providers, the emergence of PaaS alternatives and possibly an approaching saturation of IBM's traditional large-organization clientele.

The IBM PureApplication System integrated system strategy fits naturally with the requirements of large, application-platform-centric projects; however, only a few clients have deployed this product thus far. Therefore, its value proposition of faster deployments and lower IT operations costs must be further validated by a more significant number of real-life use cases.

IBM has made numerous attempts at targeting the low end of the market by offering various product packaging and versions. Despite the initial industry interest and traction of the recently introduced WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile, the IBM application platform offering remains primarily of

interest to user organizations implementing large and systematically oriented application projects, and does not appeal to organizations seeking a platform for opportunistically oriented developments.InterSystemsInterSystems is a long-standing technology provider in application infrastructure markets. While the vendor is best known for its outstanding execution and understanding of the healthcare market's requirements, it has also been a technology provider in other verticals, such as financial services, logistics, shipping and government.InterSystems' application and data integration capabilities are provided by InterSystems Ensemble, its collection of prebuilt integration adapters and its adapter development framework. InterSystems Ensemble is an integrated application development, deployment, composition and integration platform that uses the vendor's Caché object and relational database as its foundation. Ensemble is also available as a hosted service on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The Active Analytics extension to Ensemble supports business analytics, including support for unstructured data types.The InterSystems HealthShare health informatics platform builds on Ensemble, and provides specialized application integration capabilities for the healthcare industry. The privately held company claims over 1,500 customers and $446 million in total revenue in FY12 and nearly $500 million in total revenue for FY13.Strengths

InterSystems is an application, integration and database platform provider with a leading international presence in the healthcare industry, as well as successful participation in other verticals. As a profitable private business with no debt, a growing worldwide presence and a large number of partners, InterSystems is a formidable platform middleware provider.

A large number of healthcare solution providers and some other independent software vendors (ISVs) have standardized on InterSystems' platform technologies. The company's offerings for electronic health record exchange, with HealthShare and TrakCare (based on Ensemble), maintain InterSystems' leadership as the healthcare industry changes worldwide.

The vendor's presence and name recognition in the healthcare industry as an integration technology provider, as well as advanced support for healthcare industry integration standards and protocols, allow InterSystems to effectively compete in this market against software industry megavendors like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

InterSystems has an advanced, well-integrated technology suite, including a dual-mode (object-oriented and relational) database (Caché), internal support for event processing in the Ensemble platform, a large collection of application and protocol adapters (especially rich for the healthcare industry), multilayer business process orchestration tools, increasingly sophisticated business analytics, and other platform functionality.

Internal architectural consistency establishes a foundation for the coherent integrated execution of various InterSystems products. It also helps increase productivity, and improves the quality of the development environment and management of the execution environment.Cautions

Although InterSystems has had success as an application integration and platform provider in other verticals, it remains best known in the healthcare market. This, combined with a minimal influence on industry trends, consortia and standards initiatives outside healthcare, has limited the vendor's presence and impact in the overall application infrastructure market.

Minimal support for specialized B2B integration scenarios (such as trading partner management) has forced some customers to select alternative vendors and to take on the consequent additional cost of system integration.

Although SOA interoperability is well-supported, SOA-style application modeling, tracking and governance are somewhat limited, relative to the other comprehensive application development and integration middleware vendors. Centered around its ESB functionality, the InterSystems platform is well-suited for the development of situational composite applications, but it is less competitive for systematic composite application projects.

Although it partly uses Java, the otherwise nonstandard programming model requires additional training and includes proprietary software that is only useful in the InterSystems environment. Proprietary database and platform components result in significant customer lock-in.

InterSystems has been slower than some of its competitors in its response to the growing demands for cloud, mobile and social computing and other new integration industry trends. This has been addressed somewhat by recent and continuing investment in big data business analytics and recently delivered basic technology for rapid development of mobile applications, and in support for the participation of mobile devices in business process workflows.

InterSystems' only cloud offering is a hosted Amazon machine image. As cloud computing grows in popularity, more InterSystems customers and partner ISVs will likely ask for a cloud-based alternative to the vendor's current on-premises offerings.MicrosoftMicrosoft is a major enterprise application infrastructure vendor, despite the mostly proprietary nature of its programming model. Most of the Microsoft application platform technology is integrated and packaged with the Windows Server OS; there is no separate offering that is an application server. The platform technologies bundled with Windows Server include the .NET framework (including ASP.NET, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation); Internet Information Services; Windows Server AppFabric; and more.Microsoft's primary integration offerings include BizTalk Server 2013 (for on-premises integration), and the cloud-based Windows Azure BizTalk Services and Windows Azure Service Bus (for integration hosted in the Windows Azure cloud platform). BizTalk Server 2013 is tightly integrated with Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server and the Windows Azure Service Bus offering.In the 2012 "Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic Application Integration Projects," Gartner documented Microsoft's intentions to provide only two additional releases beyond BizTalk Server. This year, the vendor dramatically altered those plans, committing to supporting and enhancing BizTalk Server "as long as organizations use it for integration within the enterprise."BizTalk Server 2013 incorporates Microsoft's BizTalk ESB Toolkit, which previously has been provided as a separate, but free, offering. In previous versions of BizTalk Server, integration developers were required to manually integrate BizTalk ESB Toolkit with BizTalk Server to effectively create their own ESB. In addition to its on-premises offerings, BizTalk Server 2013 is also available hosted on Windows Azure.BizTalk Server has the largest customer base of any ESB offering, commercial or OSS. However, Microsoft is investing heavily in cloud integration capabilities, and, as this evolves to include capabilities comparable with BizTalk Server, existing customers will need to choose the right time, integration patterns and use cases to adopt cloud-based BizTalk Services for new interfaces.Strengths

Microsoft has a massive presence and a proven reputation with mainstream software developers, resulting in the broad use of Microsoft development tools across industries and geographies. This means that resources with Microsoft skills are readily available in the market, which lowers IT costs.

The large ecosystem of ISV partners serves as a powerful channel for Windows Server offerings and adds to the long-term viability of .NET application infrastructure, despite its proprietary nature.

Because of the shared Windows Server and .NET underpinnings, users of applications from Microsoft and its partners experience the benefits of some architectural coherence across Windows applications. In addition to the underlying platform, the Visual Studio design environment offers consistency in application development experience. Microsoft System Center is designed to centrally monitor and manage application and system execution across on-premises deployments and on Windows Azure.

Microsoft's cloud-first and cloud OS strategies position it to offer a comprehensive hybrid enterprise computing environment where private and public clouds form a continuum.

BizTalk Server has an installed base of more than 12,000 customers, two-thirds of which are estimated by Microsoft to be using BizTalk Server 2006 Enterprise Edition or newer versions. This huge installed base has resulted in the broad availability of service providers and consultants with BizTalk Server skills, as well as a thriving market for BizTalk Server add-ins, such as those from Art2link and Tallan.

The highly popular .NET-based SharePoint portal serves as a high-productivity application platform and complements the .NET C# programming environment.

.NET developers are quickly able to adapt to Microsoft's approach to developing interfaces. This results in a huge pool of relatively inexpensive resources (compared with Java developers) from which organizations can draw to support the development, operations and maintenance of BizTalk Server interfaces.

BizTalk is the least expensive licensed integration offering from a leading vendor. The .NET framework and AppFabric are provided at no additional cost as part of Windows OSs. Naturally, Microsoft uses price as a competitive weapon for these SOA infrastructure offerings.Cautions

The absence of a unified metadata repository, API/service management and SOA governance tools (some are delivered via partnerships with SOA Software and Nevatech) challenges Microsoft customers' ability to manage a systematic SOA environment and questions Microsoft's commitment to SOA as the principal software design model.

The transition to a cloud-first software engineering plan, while progressive in the long term, slows down company investment in current on-premises application platform technologies. The in-memory computing capability, offered as an important platform innovation in 2010, remains an immature capability with little recent expansion. Microsoft's private cloud capability is minimal and lacks native autoscaling.

Although interoperable with many outside environments, the Microsoft .NET application platform locks its applications into Windows Server; even applications built to run on the .NET-based Windows Azure cloud services platform are not fully portable to Microsoft's on-premises version of .NET.

Despite strategic participation in the mobile computing market (Windows Phone, Surface), little of this initiative is targeting enterprise computing projects. Enterprise architects get limited and spotty direct tooling and support for mobile, social or big data analytics initiatives (although some tools are planned).

As of June 2013, Microsoft is offering a public preview of BizTalk Services. However, the functionality of this technical preview is somewhat limited, it is not meant to be used for production deployments, and there is no guarantee that the version of Azure Service Bus and BizTalk Services used for the on-premises product will look like the technical preview.

Microsoft is expanding BizTalk Services with progressive releases of new features at a frequency of approximately every four months. However, BizTalk Services has limited capabilities compared with BizTalk Server. Examples of interfaces that can currently be considered for deployment on Windows Azure include those for integrating with trading partners using electronic data interchange (EDI) or integrating cloud-to-on-premises applications.

The growing maturity of OSS application integration offerings, available under low-cost subscription licenses, will somewhat undercut the low price position that has been successfully leveraged by Microsoft.OracleDuring the past 10 years, Oracle's application infrastructure middleware offering — Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) — has been constantly evolving through internal development and acquisitions.OFM is founded on the market-leading Oracle WebLogic Server Java EE application and other application platform technologies. Since the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010, Oracle owns the intellectual property of the key Java technology set. Oracle sells its application platform technologies not only as a set of stand-alone products and product suites, but also as an enabler for its packaged application business, its public cloud initiative (Oracle Cloud) and as components of the Oracle Engineered Systems offering of integrated systems.The evaluation of Oracle's capabilities was based on the functionality provided by the OFM 11g family of products, which includes:

Oracle SOA Suite (Oracle Service Bus, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Oracle Business Rules, Oracle B2B, Oracle Business Activity Monitoring and other components), supporting ESB and orchestration requirements

Oracle WebLogic Suite (Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition [already available in the 12c release], Oracle Coherence, Oracle TopLink, Oracle Web Tier and other components), providing a Java EE-based back-end container, IMDG, and object-relational mapping and load-balancing capabilities

Oracle JDeveloper, for application modeling and development

Oracle WebCenter Portal, providing front-end container capabilities Oracle Service Registry, Oracle Enterprise Repository and Oracle SOA Management Pack, for application

service governance Oracle Enterprise Manager, for application administration, monitoring, management and governance

Strengths OFM is a large business that positions Oracle as the second-largest application infrastructure middleware

vendor and the No. 1 application server provider in the market, according to Gartner 2012 market share data (see "Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012").

OFM provides leading technologies to support both systematic application integration and SOA infrastructure requirements.

OFM technology is supported by a vast network of partners and leverages a large talent pool available around the world. Thousands of organizations in virtually every geography and in multiple vertical industries have successfully deployed combinations of OFM products, in a large number of cases to support large and business-critical application development, deployment and integration projects. At times, these projects involve Oracle's packaged applications; however, just as often, OFM is used in scenarios that are not focused on Oracle applications.

OFM provides a comprehensive, feature-rich and integrated application environment (i.e., it has a common development toolset, management environment, metadata services and runtime platform). OFM also includes the market-leading Oracle WebLogic Server and the popular and advanced Oracle Coherence in-memory technology. These products are tightly integrated with Oracle Database, they are incorporated in numerous Oracle packaged application offerings and they are optimized for the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud integrated system platform.

The OFM road map addresses key application platform technologies (e.g., HTML5 and Java EE 7), emerging requirements (e.g., support for mobile devices, multitenancy and in-memory computing) and emerging delivery models (e.g., private cloud infrastructure as a service [IaaS] plus middleware support, public and private PaaS, and integrated systems).Cautions

In 2012, Oracle's revenue in the key ESB suite segment grew 0.8%, while the segment itself grew 4.6%. Also, in 2012, Oracle maintained market share leadership in the application server segment, but its revenue grew significantly slower than in 2011 (6.6% versus 18.4%). Moreover, revenue growth in 2012 was negative (−6.0%) in portal products. Although these results are in line with IBM, Oracle's primary competitor in application infrastructure, Oracle's slowdown happened despite a significant marketing and sales push for Oracle Exalogic, which is expected to drive Oracle WebLogic Suite sales. The slowdown may indicate sales execution problems in some geographies. It also may reflect intensified competition from traditional players, greater effectiveness of open-source providers, the emergence of PaaS alternatives and user organizations' perceptions of OFM as an expensive offering. Scheduling of WebLogic Server support in OFM is not coordinated with the release of new versions of that product (e.g., at this time, Web LogicServer is in version 12c, while the OFM stack is still in Web LogicServer version 11g). In some cases, this contributes to users having to delay adoption of new versions of Web LogicServer.

Some large and loyal OFM users, especially those accustomed to BEA Systems' support, continue to report dissatisfaction with Oracle's support.

Some Oracle clients are experiencing licensing and pricing issues when upgrading from the previous-generation Oracle Internet Application Server to Oracle WebLogic Server. In many situations, the Oracle sales force pushes clients to upgrade to the top-of-line Oracle WebLogic Suite, the most functionally rich, but also the most expensive version of the product, even when less expensive versions (Oracle WebLogic Server Basic, Oracle WebLogic Server Standard and Oracle WebLogic Server Enterprise) could technically suit clients' requirements.

The vendor hasn't yet fully articulated a vision regarding emerging integration requirements, such as cloud services integration, mobile application integration and the Internet of Things. Although Oracle B2B Integration (part of Oracle SOA Suite) is a legitimate B2B gateway, it misses key features (supplier scorecard, campaign management and trading partner self-provisioning) that are typically supported by leading B2B products. Oracle has minimal strategic focus on e-commerce B2B integration, and its track

record in this market is limited, compared with that of B2B specialists or other application integration middleware providers.Red HatRed Hat is a leading provider of open-source Java EE platform technology, successfully competing directly against some of the software industry megavendors. Red Hat JBoss Middleware is well-positioned to support SOA-style business application projects, although Red Hat's investment in SOA governance does not match the functional completeness of its application server offering.Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works (formerly Red Hat JBoss SOA Platform) are Red Hat's primary technologies for supporting new SOA application development. JBoss Enterprise Web Server is the assembly of Apache Tomcat and Apache Web Server. WildFly (formerly JBoss Application Server) is the unsupported open-source Java EE application server. Recently, Red Hat delivered OpenShift Enterprise, an on-premises PaaS offering that supports Java EE, as well as Ruby, Python, Node.js and other programming environments. The public cloud version of OpenShift remains in beta.While it offered the JBoss ESB as a component of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Red Hat was not previously evaluated for the application integration Magic Quadrant because it positioned JBoss ESB in support of SOA projects, rather than application integration projects. In September 2012, Red Hat acquired FuseSource, an OSS ESB provider, from Progress Software. Red Hat continues to support the spectrum of Apache OSS technologies that comprise FuseSource, including ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, Camel and CXF, as well as Fuse ESB Enterprise (the integration platform) and Fuse MQ Enterprise (the messaging platform component of Fuse ESB Enterprise). These technologies are now offered in two different offerings: Red Hat JBoss Fuse and Red Hat JBoss Fuse Service Works.While the acquisition certainly moves Red Hat and JBoss forward in the application infrastructure space, it also presents two significant challenges. First, Red Hat/JBoss must smoothly transition the customers of SOA Platform based on JBoss ESB to JBoss Fuse Service Works, which includes JBoss Fuse along with additional capabilities in BPEL, SOA governance and a service component architecture (SCA)-based service framework called SwitchYard. The second and greater challenge is for the vendor to make a name for itself in the application integration market. While the FuseSource customer base provides a starting point, Red Hat will be challenged to establish the same acceptance that has been built for its application platform offerings.Strengths

The combination of a leading open-source OS (Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL]) and open-source Java EE application server technology (JBoss) positions the vendor as a major player in the important enterprise software infrastructure market. An all-open-source offering is appealing to many projects, while competing open-source Java EE offerings have not been successful at building share in this market. Red Hat JBoss Middleware is well-established as an independent Java EE alternative to the software industry giants, such as IBM and Oracle.

The open-source heritage of JBoss' application platform offerings lays the foundation for a well-architected and extensible software suite. The large space of available open-source projects provides an opportunity for the vendor to rapidly adopt new capabilities as the software industry expands. The reputation of open-source offerings continues to solidify with mainstream enterprise IT, and JBoss has experienced steady growth in the adoption of many of its offerings.

OpenShift Enterprise, a recently delivered cloud-enabled application platform positions JBoss as a promising provider for private PaaS implementations in enterprises looking to preserve their established Java EE code, skills and practices in the transition to cloud computing. The product takes full advantage of the synergies of Red Hat's core OS and JBoss middleware products to offer a platform with strong continuity for established users of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (and other Java EE platforms).

JBoss Fuse ESB offers a solid foundation of OSS application integration components (including ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, Camel and CXF) which are extended with management and monitoring capabilities and an integrated development environment.

The broad acceptance of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform across most verticals and geographies, as well as its commitment to be fully open source (which has a strong and growing appeal in many IT organizations, including government) will accelerate the adoption of JBoss Fuse ESB.

There is an additional staff of Red Hat engineers who are prolific contributors to Apache communities that create and extend integration offerings (for example, Camel, Karaf, CXF and ActiveMQ). This will extend the vendor's former engineering staff with previously described Apache projects, enabling it to provide better customer support.

Red Hat has a broad array of complementary offerings, including JBoss Data Grid, JBoss Portal, JBoss BRMS and JBoss Data Virtualization.Cautions

Red Hat has the challenge of smoothly transitioning JBoss SOA Platform users to JBoss Fuse (e.g., the Fuse ESB platform), which will improve Red Hat's focus once there is only one ESB that needs support.

The initial JBoss Fuse ESB offerings are targeted toward technical developers and are more difficult to use than HTML5-based offerings from competing providers.

The adapters offered by Red Hat are primarily technical in nature (for example, DBMSs, MOM and protocols), although it partners with GT Software and iWay Software for packaged application adapters. This could leave Red Hat in the lurch if a new, popular packaged or SaaS application is released, and GT Software and iWay Software decide not to create an adapter.

The prevailing Red Hat JBoss Middleware adoption driver continues to be a lower-cost alternative to the closed-source application platform offerings. This attitude masks the technical merits of the Red Hat software and reduces its adoption for large-scale, mission-critical projects. The vendor's efforts to overcome this challenge and promote the technical excellence of its offerings have not yet been successful.

A lack of competitive tools dedicated to big data analytics, mobile and social computing often defers Red Hat JBoss Middleware adoption for leading enterprise IT innovation projects.

Red Hat's limited marketing budget for these products (which is typical for the open-source offerings) leaves a lot of the building of mind share to a word-of-mouth process. This approach is relatively slow and has not been fully effective in the enterprise context.SAPSAP is a significant vendor of application infrastructure technology. Its primary portfolio for on-premises application integration and platform middleware is the NetWeaver family of products. This suite of application infrastructure products includes:

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration (combining the previously separate SAP NetWeaver Process Integration, SAP NetWeaver BPM and SAP NetWeaver BRM)

SAP NetWeaver Process Orchestration B2B add-on components SAP NetWeaver Application Server Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP)/Application

Server Java SAP NetWeaver Portal SAP NetWeaver Gateway (a lightweight, OData/REST-enabled integration platform) Portions of SAP Solution Manager

SAP uses this product line to build, integrate and run its applications, and many SAP customers have used it to integrate and extend their SAP applications. The platform is broadly capable and integrates with other SAP offerings, including mobile infrastructure and portal services. Newer capabilities, such as social computing, are still somewhat underdeveloped. The platform lags others in some of its operational characteristics, such as support for continuous operation.SAP's on-premises integration technology has evolved during the past several releases, and its performance and scalability have improved significantly during that time. However, this market is relatively mature, and organizations often own several application development and integration suites (including SAP's) and make the choice to use one or the other based on the skills of the personnel doing the work. This has led to the current situation in which the vast majority of SAP NetWeaver implementations are used to extend and connect SAP applications. SAP has not created a substantial base outside its application customers, but that is a large target.The introduction of SAP Hana, an in-memory DBMS based on a cloud-style infrastructure, has extended the notion of the SAP platform, since Hana contains a JavaScript execution environment and other application platform capabilities. Hana will be progressively integrated into SAP's application infrastructure technology, but the details regarding how this will happen have not been fully articulated.

SAP's application and integration platforms and tools are increasingly focused on leveraging the in-memory processing capabilities of the Hana engine.SAP already offers cloud-based analogues to various NetWeaver components under the SAP Hana Cloud Platform label (including an application platform, an integration platform and a portal capability, as well as analytics and mobile features). The vendor has said that it will migrate changes made in these cloud deliverables to its NetWeaver products. This strategy may be difficult for SAP to sustain indefinitely, and it is possible that it will attempt to unify the code lines.This period of building out SAP Hana Cloud Platform-specific capabilities and cloud integration and compatibility features, as well as the focus on Hana DBMS as a prerequisite for enhanced capabilities within SAP's applications, will be challenging for SAP in the near term. We expect that will improve as the details of the strategy unfold, and the long-term outcomes for customers may be positive, because they will have a platform with extensive capabilities around cloud-style functionality, hybrid cloud and in-memory computing.Strengths

Integration with SAP applications, tooling and other technologies (such as SAP Hana) makes the platform straightforward to adopt by SAP customers. Also, most SAP system integrators can offer resources with skills in SAP's middleware products.

SAP has made major investments in extensions to the core platform, such as in-memory technology, mobile and business intelligence capabilities. This allows SAP to deliver rapid mobile and analytics capabilities in its applications, and these are available to customers as well as ISV developers. Common content and association with leading-edge developments, such as Hana, make using this environment attractive for SAP's customers and partners.

SAP has invested in developing a dedicated global technology sales force and support organization. SAP is dedicated to a hybrid cloud/on-premises strategy for its applications. This is influencing its

development of the platform, and should result in a highly functional system for organizations as they seek hybrid cloud solutions.Cautions

SAP's strategy has become complicated by the introduction of cloud versions based on a new code line and Hana's evolution as a platform. Users who are committed to the SAP application platform, and are not making use of Hana or creating hybrid-cloud deployments, will see relatively few notable changes to current capabilities.

While competitive, SAP has been unable to clearly differentiate the value of using its platform in a way that has attracted users who do not deploy SAP applications and developers who do not focus on creating extensions to SAP applications. Although the platform is widely used to deliver functionality that includes both SAP and non-SAP assets, it is nearly always sold and acquired as an accompaniment to an SAP application environment.

While NetWeaver Process Orchestration's capabilities for application-to-application (A2A) integration are comparable to those of other leading integration platforms, SAP's on-premises B2B integration solutions are seen as insufficient by the vendor's customers with complex supply chain integration challenges. SAP introduced a new on-premises B2B integration module (based on content acquired from itelligence) in early 2012, and it has made a significant investment in developing a cloud-based B2B integration service by purchasing Ariba and its network. While SAP NetWeaver Gateway provides a simple API framework for B2B access to the SAP Business Suite, a lack of API management features hinders the SAP's ability to take advantage of the Web API integration opportunity.

SAP's innovative technology is an advantage for the vendor overall, with NetWeaver Process Orchestration positioned as the on-premises solution, SAP Hana Cloud Integration providing cloud-based integration and data services, and SAP NetWeaver Gateway providing REST/OData APIs into the SAP Business Suite. However, the juxtaposition of these solutions and Dell Boomi AtomSpher (embedded in SuccessFactors and Ariba) offers multiple overlapping integration products that make it difficult for clients and prospects to understand what is the right solution for them.Tibco Software

Tibco Software is a long-standing player and leader in the ESB and MOM middleware markets, The vendor has evolved to offer platform technologies suitable for supporting a range of use cases. The products considered in assessing Tibco in this research include:

Tibco ActiveMatrix Service Grid, Tibco BusinessEvents Extreme and Tibco Silver Fabric for application containers

ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks and ActiveMatrix Service Bus for ESB functionality ActiveMatrix BPM for BPM ActiveMatrix Lifecycle Governance Framework, ActiveMatrix Policy Director, Tibco Service Performance

Manager and Tibco API Exchange for application service governance Tibco ActiveSpaces IMDG Tibco BusinessEvents and Tibco StreamBase for complex event processing Tibco Hawk for monitoring and management

During 2011, Tibco introduced Silver Fabric, a cloud management platform that has the potential to support a hybrid cloud scenario in which Silver Fabric can deploy and manage application stacks based on all types of technologies (Tibco's or others) in both private and public cloud environments. However, customers have focused on using it to manage private clouds.Strengths

Tibco has a well-established reputation in enterprise-class messaging, event processing, application integration and SOA infrastructure initiatives. A notable, loyal installed base of large organizations and a network of established partners serve as a fertile base for upselling the vendor's application platform technology.

Tibco's set of OSGi-based development components, combined with BPM tools, SCA-based development tools, life cycle management and a rich set of integration capabilities, creates a functionally rich environment for a range of application requirements, including high-performance/high-scale business-critical systems.

The elastically scalable ActiveMatrix Service Grid supports development of Java and .NET-based back-end business logic. Tibco ActiveSpaces enables high-performance/high-scale, in-memory computing. Tibco BusinessEvents provides a platform for advanced, event-driven SOA applications.

Tibco BusinessEvents Extreme provides a visionary event-driven, Java-based, in-memory application server capable of targeting the most demanding requirements for performance and scalability, while maintaining compatibility with Java Platform, Standard Edition specifications.Cautions

While Tibco is an acknowledged leader in the application integration market, it is largely unknown as an application platform provider. Limited company marketing investment further holds back its recognition in the application platform market.

Tibco has developed a Java application container supporting plain old Java objects (POJO) and Spring Framework programming; however, the vendor is rarely considered by new prospects choosing an application server, or by ISVs developing packaged applications and tools. Therefore, the Tibco application platform is prevailingly used in the context of large BPM, SOA, composition or integration projects to host incremental business logic; it is rarely used to support new application developments.

Tibco's application platform is relatively expensive and complex, targeting more-advanced and more-demanding projects. However, not all of its features are needed by small or midsize businesses and lines of business seeking simpler, less expensive solutions that are "good enough." To respond to this, the vendor proposes subscription-based pricing as part of its integration platform as a service (iPaaS), Cloud Bus. Also, an edition of its integration platform, ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Express, is aggressively priced for Web and mobile projects.

With Silver Fabric and Cloud Bus, Tibco is positioned to support a hybrid integration platform (an integration platform that combines cloud-based technology with on-premises technology). However, it hasn't capitalized on this position to advance its differentiation.

Like the other major application integration vendors, Tibco has seen a slowdown in revenue growth from this market. While some of this slowdown may be due to external issues (for example, the impact of the recessions in North America and Europe), Tibco has also experienced sales execution issues, which it is in the process of addressing.

WSO2WSO2 offers an open-source platform that contains a broad range of capabilities, and it is commonly used as a development and/or integration platform by enterprises. The WSO2 product set consists of:

WSO2 Application Server WSO2 API Manager WSO2 Identity Server WSO2 Business Process Server WSO2 Business Rules Server WSO2 ESB WSO2 Message Broker WSO2 Governance Registry WSO2 Data Services Server WSO2 Business Activity Monitor WSO2 Complex Event Processor WSO2 Elastic Load Balancer

This impressively broad portfolio contains components that are intentionally streamlined and somewhat minimalist in terms of their functionality, eliminating infrequently used features and focusing on the needs of enterprise integration and the deployment of newer applications and architectures, including private cloud and application platform as a service (aPaaS) deployments. The products are largely based on Apache projects, and all the components of the WSO2 solution are available under an open-source license, which means that a percentage of users are operating without support agreements.WSO2's capabilities are used by hundreds of organizations, and in some high-scale situations and by some cloud services providers. The vendor has been expanding, particularly in North America (e.g., with a recently opened support center in Bloomington, Indiana). It has its roots in the U.K. and Sri Lanka, where it maintains offshore development and support.Strengths

WSO2 provides a broad portfolio of technology, including support for development and deployment of SOA-style applications, API management and application integration. WSO2 has been leading in innovation that enables developers to deploy applications on-premises or in the cloud with a platform that provides native elasticity and multitenancy, and supports hybrid cloud deployment models.

WSO2 offers a complete open-source portfolio, which reduces its costs and prices, simplifies consumption by customers, and has led to a notable installed base.

WSO2's broad portfolio of technology includes capabilities to support private cloud and other deployment options, which positions them favorably versus other OSS options.

Substantial proof points for application development, deployment and integration, including high-volume and high-scale environments, add credibility for a relatively small company.

A combination of simplified functions, various deployment options and a completely open-source model makes it easy for customers to consume WSO2 products, even when compared with other open-source middleware.Cautions

Simplicity of technology is achieved by focusing on critical functions and features; support for advanced scenarios or edge cases may be missed in certain circumstances.

The open-source integration market has the potential for realignment if Red Hat improves its integration capabilities, which would represent a substantial challenge for all open-source integration vendors, including WSO2.

Local knowledge and skills are very scarce outside the U.S. and U.K., so organizations wishing to use this technology may have to maintain skills around it in-house.

Bottom LineWhen selecting a vendor of a comprehensive application development and integration suite, evaluate each vendor's capabilities for integrating existing applications as well as for developing new applications. While it's entirely possible that you will occasionally require the development of a completely stand-alone application, you will far more likely find that your projects involve the development of composite

applications and business process management solutions, both of which are best-supported through use of an SOA.Consequently, your evaluation of middleware suites should lean heavily on your assessment of each vendor's ability to support SOA and other integration-related architectures and methodologies. The vendor strengths and cautions noted in this research will help you in that regard.

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service7 January 2014 ID:G00254917

Analyst(s): Yefim V. Natis, Massimo Pezzini, Mark Driver, David Mitchell Smith, Kimihiko Iijima, Ross Altman

VIEW SUMMARY

Enterprise CIOs, IT planners and architects at a growing number of organizations are turning to the cloud for their new application initiatives. We examine the leading vendor offerings in the enterprise aPaaS market designed to support and advance these initiatives.

Market Definition/DescriptionApplication infrastructure (middleware) functionality enriched with cloud characteristics and offered uniformly to all qualified subscribers, as a service, while encapsulating and hiding the underlying system infrastructure, is a platform as a service (PaaS; Gartner refers to it more precisely as cloud application infrastructure services).A PaaS that is designed to enable runtime deployment, management and maintenance of cloud business application services is an application PaaS (aPaaS).An aPaaS that is designed to support the enterprise requirements for business applications and application projects is an enterprise aPaaS.Enterprise aPaaS is a cloud service. Although software facilitates its functionality, the ultimate deliverable is a service, and the vendor evaluations in this research are of service providers (that utilize software "behind the scenes"), rather than software vendors.See "Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2013" for an expanded definition of aPaaS and other forms of cloud application infrastructure services (PaaS).

Magic QuadrantFigure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service

Source: Gartner (January 2014)

Vendor Strengths and CautionsAppPoint Software SolutionsAppPoint Software Solutions is headquartered in India and provides the AppsOnAzure aPaaS offering, a cloud services rendition of its BizApp Studio .NET-based application development platform, deployed on Microsoft Azure.AppsOnAzure is completely compatible with BizApp Studio, and applications are fully portable between the two platforms. AppsOnAzure is based on a shared container, elastically scalable multitenancy model enabled by the metadata-based architecture of the product.Strengths

AppsOnAzure provides a rich set of aPaaS capabilities supported by a browser-based, model-driven development environment, including process integration, an integrated set of application and data integration features, and support for mobility.

AppsOnAzure's 12-month road map includes notable items such as autoscaling; subtenancy; and support for DevOps APIs, analytics and mobile analytics, NoSQL, and collaboration.

Some customers mention the zero coding, rapid development environment and the AppPoint's flexibility as the major benefits of working with the vendor.Cautions

Most AppPoint clients have deployed the on-premises BizApp Studio, and only a dozen or so leverage the cloud-based AppsOnAzure rendition, typically for relatively small-scale production deployments.

The vendor has minimal brand awareness and limited (although from some notable system integrators) third-party support. It has limited plans to improve its market visibility.

AppPoint clients mention the current analytical capabilities, a lack of SLA commitments and the vendor's ability to meet agreed-on deadlines as areas of desired improvement.CenturyLink-Tier 3This evaluation covers the Tier 3 aPaaS offering. The company was acquired by CenturyLink as we were finishing this research. Although we are reflecting on the consequences of the acquisition in this Magic Quadrant, the rating remains only of the Tier 3 component of the larger CenturyLink technology portfolio. CenturyLink is the third-largest U.S. telecommunications company. It offers savvisdirect, public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), following its acquisition of Savvis in 2011. CenturyLink first entered the PaaS market with the acquisition of AppFog in June 2013, followed by its acquisition of Tier 3 in November 2013.CenturyLink Cloud (formerly Tier 3) offers an IaaS platform (its core business) and WebFabric, a cloud application platform offering based on the open-source Cloud Foundry v.1 software extended to support .NET (Iron Foundry). WebFabric is the vendor's high-control, cloud-based aPaaS that is available only in isolated-tenancy mode (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"). This architecture provides dedicated execution space to tenants, but features minimal resource sharing or elasticity. AppFog, acquired earlier, is also based on Cloud Foundry v.1 software, but without the .NET extension. The two platforms share some code fundamentals, but will require a significant engineering effort to advance to the current version of Cloud Foundry, and to be combined into an integrated service. Prior to their acquisitions, both Tier 3 and AppFog had modest aPaaS market shares and name recognition.Strengths

The design of the WebFabric cloud platform technology, integrated with the established and innovative Tier 3 IaaS network, provides a potential for differentiating custom optimizations.

Support of .NET applications in the public PaaS environment is relatively rare and differentiates WebFabric from most competitors — even more so, considering that multiple other language environments can be colocated on the same IaaS foundation.

The acquisition of Tier 3 by CenturyLink will provide additional capital and new sales channels, increasing the potential of the vendor to market and sell its PaaS software and services.Cautions

Although WebFabric takes PaaS-style responsibility for management and versioning of the middleware technology, the tenants are not running in a shared environment; each tenant deployment is separate, and requires its own dedicated management and resource allocation. While such dedicated architecture may be attractive to some customers, its high costs and limited agility are not competitive in the general PaaS market and will stifle the vendor's ability to grow as a PaaS provider.

While Tier 3 is established as an innovator in the IaaS market, WebFabric has yet to carve out a dependable market share or name recognition in the crowded field of aPaaS vendors. The upsell from IaaS alone may prove insufficient to generate strong market adoption. The lack of an ecosystem of SaaS independent software vendor (ISV) partners is the further obstacle the vendor will have to overcome.

A lack of model-driven development productivity tools or plans for PaaS functionality aimed at enterprise application projects, including application integration, business process management (BPM), event processing and big data management, will compel many mainstream enterprises to look elsewhere.

The acquisition by CenturyLink will present a challenge of reconciliation and integration of WebFabric and AppFog, two aPaaS offerings, both of which had limited enterprise application platform market share on their own. Some discontinuities in the WebFabric road map are a likely side effect of this effort.

CloudBeesCloudBees is a U.S.-based provider of cloud services formed in 2010 by alumni of Red Hat JBoss, dedicated to the open-source software process and business model. The vendor delivers three major PaaS offerings: DEV@cloud — a development, continuous integration, test and life cycle management platform (application development life cycle management [ADLM] PaaS); RUN@cloud — a shared-OS, cloud-based high-control aPaaS; and WEAVE@cloud — an integration service (using the technology of the recently acquired FoxWeave, an integration PaaS [iPaaS]). The services can be provisioned in a shared or dedicated mode. In addition, the vendor manages a cloud-based relational database management system (DBMS), based on MySQL, for use with its application life cycle and runtime deployment PaaS. CloudBees offers no aPaaS software for deployment on-premises; however, there are multiple on-premises offerings of the same open-source platform technology available from third parties. DEV@cloud has a managed on-premises option and an Eclipse toolkit plug-in.Strengths

A comprehensive application life cycle management service, including development, test, staging, deployment, monitoring, version control and continuous integration, positions CloudBees ahead of most cloud competitors in completeness of support for high-control software projects.

The vendor has a strong commitment to openness, including the broad use of open-source software; support of multiple target application server containers beyond its own RUN@cloud (including Tomcat, JBoss and GlassFish); multiple languages, including Java, Node.js, and JVM languages like Clojure and Erlang; multiple frameworks, including Spring; the ability to be deployed on a variety of IaaS platforms; and the ability to deploy developed applications on competitors' platforms, including Google App Engine, Heroku and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk. This commitment supports strong portability and brings to a minimum the degree of vendor lock-in for CloudBees' customers. The vendor continues to expand its list of supported languages, platforms, frameworks and target execution environments.

Addition of integration services (iPaaS) via the recent acquisition of FoxWeave deepens the potential relationship of CloudBees with its customers, as most newly deployed cloud application services must be integrated with the processes and data of other cloud and on-premises applications. Planned support of the mobile back-end services will further increase the vendor's addressable market and will protect its competitiveness.

The fast-growing base of an estimated 500 paying production customers, and a good ecosystem of technology and business service partners, is a good foundation for growth in the new and still emerging aPaaS market.Cautions

Dependence on partners for support of such fundamental modern capabilities as native mobile application design or event stream processing to support an Internet-of-Things-style of applications may cause some leading-edge application projects to look elsewhere.

Support for only the relational data model, with dependence on partners for multimodel big data processing, parallelization, in-memory computing and business analytics, can make the platform insufficient for some advanced enterprise application projects.

No high-productivity option limits the offering to only systematic IT software projects, keeping CloudBees away from the large proportion of cloud platform use by citizen developers in line of business (LOB) organizations.

CloudBees must face IT industry megavendors that are encroaching on the Java aPaaS space with a limited ability to invest in marketing and direct sales, and a lack of support of the full Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) function set.cloudControlA German company, cloudControl provides an eponymous European-centric, cloud-based, high-control, shared-OS application PaaS, deployed on Amazon data centers located in EMEA. It also offers cloud-enabled application platform (CEAP) software, called Application Lifecycle Engine. The vendor offers services or managed private PaaS software to enterprise IT organizations, but focuses particular attention on supporting other PaaS and potentially SaaS service providers through its white-label-managed PaaS partnerships. Managed PaaS is cloudControl's software that is deployed in the data

centers of the customer's choice, but is managed by the vendor while the customer presents the services to its customers, fully customized to their brands.Strengths

The vendor has a well-established European customer base, claiming over 400 paying customers across service subscribers, software licensees and white-label-managed service providers. This establishes a good starting position for cloudControl to expand into new geographies and to build up its support of hybrid cloud deployments.

Support of buildpack specifications enables the cloudControl, its partners and its customers to extend the platform with new language engines, frameworks, databases and other software services available from other buildpack-supporting vendors, including salesforce.com's Heroku, IBM's future BlueMix, Pivotal, ActiveState, CenturyLink and others. Many of these buildpacks are open source.

The vendor's white-label-managed service partnerships with telecommunications companies and others set it apart from many other aPaaS providers, with a potential avenue of growth.Cautions

cloudControl's exclusive presence in European markets limits its brand recognition and ability to compete elsewhere, including in the important North American markets. Its white-label approach further "hides" the company's brand from its potential market.

A dependence on partners for advanced capabilities such as big data management and analytics, native mobile computing, and social collaboration makes cloudControl's market position vulnerable to better-equipped competitors.

The absence of an ecosystem of SaaS partners utilizing cloudControl's platform can be a significant competitive handicap, considering that extension and customization of SaaS are the primary drivers for adoption of PaaS by mainstream enterprise IT organizations.

Without services for fundamentals of enterprise computing such as application integration, BPM and event processing, cloudControl adoption will be limited to mostly relatively simple and isolated enterprise cloud computing initiatives.DockerDocker (formerly dotCloud) is a U.S.-based company with a multilingual, cloud-based, shared-OS, high-control aPaaS offering (called dotCloud Platform) deployed across North America and Europe. In 2013, the vendor released its open-source Docker.io software, which facilitates isolation of application or platform instances through deployment of software in OS containers. It is a foundation of the dotCloud Platform service. Red Hat and many other vendors are in the process of adopting Docker.io code as a standard part of their offerings and as an improved alternative to the standard Linux containers (LXC) technology. Docker continues to offer and support its aPaaS, but nearly all of the vendor's strategic focus has shifted to support the Docker.io open-source project. Docker.io is an optimizing extension to an IaaS service or a cloud management platform, but is only an underlying feature in the scope of aPaaS and especially enterprise-oriented aPaaS. The vendor's nearly undivided focus on Docker.io capitalizes on its growing popularity, but distracts it from the enterprise aPaaS market that is evaluated in this Magic Quadrant.Strengths

The dotCloud Platform supports a wide range of languages, frameworks, DBMSs and other composable services, including Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, JavaScript, Rails, Grails, Django, Node.js, mongoDB, MySQL, Redis and PostgreSQL. This openness appeals to many developers looking for a polyglot development environment, especially when open-source-based services are preferred.

Rapid and broad adoption of Docker.io by some leading software infrastructure companies helps the vendor build name recognition and its brand, potentially differentiating this relatively new company from many of its competitors.

A relatively large installed base of aPaaS subscribers (Docker claims over 500 paying organizations) creates a foundation for further growth and the upselling of additional services in the future.Cautions

An almost exclusive focus on Docker.io distracts the vendor from developing other sources of differentiation in the enterprise aPaaS market. Although Docker.io software is the foundational part of the dotCloud Platform, the vendor may find it difficult to differentiate in the aPaaS market on just that basis

alone, especially considering that most of its competitors are incorporating the open-source Docker.io or similar alternatives.

Docker's business plan to monetize its success with Docker.io by selling support and services to its users may be difficult to materialize considering the technology is adopted by software vendors, many of which will likely rely on self-support, unlike enterprise IT organizations, which are typically interested in buying support for all their software dependencies.

The dotCloud Platform is designed for technically advanced users, including enabled external access to IP ports, assumption of stateless design of services, lack of high-productivity tools and command line self-service. At the same time, some important enterprise capabilities (such as integration, API management, flow management and native mobile client development) are not on the product road map. Docker's aPaaS product road map will likely not meet the requirements of many enterprise prospects.

With only the minimal user base or name recognition for its aPaaS offering in a mainstream enterprise computing context, the vendor faces the challenge of proving its ability to support mainstream enterprise workloads or attracting enterprise-oriented SaaS ISVs. As long as Docker's focus is outside the aPaaS market, it is unlikely to deliver this proof.Engine YardEngine Yard specializes in dedicated cloud-based deployment for Ruby on Rails applications. In addition to its flagship Ruby offering, Engine Yard also supports PHP, Node.js and Java. Engine Yard's offering is a cloud-based, shared-hardware, high-control aPaaS that uses a dedicated environment for each tenant, and its underlying infrastructure uses a shared-hardware model of multitenancy (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"). It offers a manual or scheduled scaling capability, but no autoscaling. The vendor provides a managed and curated infrastructure stack with a configurable composition that allows the user to choose automation (PaaS style) versus control (IaaS+ style). It runs on several public IaaS offerings (including AWS and Azure), as well as in the more managed environments of enterprise-focused providers, including Verizon Terremark. Engine Yard users commonly refer to it as a hosting solution; although it runs on IaaS and has some PaaS capabilities, its origin predates the PaaS architecture. It is best thought of as a self-service, high-touch, flexible, focused environment, optimized for the deployment and management of a dedicated Ruby on Rails platform (which is what most of the vendor's customers run).Strengths

Engine Yard's Ruby knowledge and focus make it an excellent choice for those looking for a dedicated virtual machine (VM)-based Ruby environment.

Engine Yard's support and reliability are cited as strengths by its customers. The vendor's tenant environments have been shown to scale well, and its underlying infrastructure can

be extensively customized, which allows for advanced technical control for customers that want it. A relatively large installed base and high revenue in the emerging aPaaS market indicate that Engine

Yard has found its market.Cautions

Engine Yard has limited cloud capabilities, particularly in elasticity and sharing. Its shared-hardware model and lack of autoscaling mean it is best-suited for environments that benefit most from manual and preplanned approaches to changing capacity.

The entry price for using Engine Yard services has not been small. Recent free trials and more competitive entry pricing are aimed at alleviating this issue, but may put pressure on the vendor's revenue in the short term.

Engine Yard is not primarily focused on alleviating subscribers' responsibilities for managing the system infrastructure and cloudiness (the core value proposition and abstraction of PaaS). Although the abstraction level provided does qualify as PaaS, much of the design and use case for Engine Yard are close to what Gartner calls "IaaS+."

Engine Yard does not provide its own integration, BPM, big data and analytics capabilities, nor does it offer a model-driven, high-productivity cloud platform environment. Those looking for an application platform for LOB levels of productivity or advanced enterprise projects will be compelled to look elsewhere.Google

Google offers its App Engine application PaaS as part of its Cloud Platform. App Engine is a shared-OS, cloud-native, high-control aPaaS. It is available in separate renditions for Java, Python, Go and, most recently, PHP. Other components of Google Cloud Platform include Compute Engine (a colocated IaaS offering); Cloud SQL (relational database PaaS [dbPaaS] using the open-source MySQL software); NoSQL Cloud Datastore (a cloud storage file system); Cloud Endpoints API generator and BigQuery (for some big data analytics).Strengths

Google's large installed base (it claims 30,000 paying customers) consists of many small Web innovators and some very large Web business sites (such as Snapchat and Khan Academy). The vendor also claims that over 90% of its internal IT is run on App Engine. The practice of the internal use of App Engine, as well as the App Engine experience of supporting the high number of isolated tenants, sets the stage for Google's enterprise campaign.

Google's outstanding reputation as a cloud services provider and an early big data innovator lends credibility to Google App Engine and other PaaS offerings for projects that require high elastic scaling, the processing of large amounts of unstructured data and some forms of business analytics.

Some of Google's recently added enterprise capabilities (including 99.95% availability SLAs, enterprise-level support, a relational database, unintrusive version control, minimal planned downtime, autoscaling, a basic in-memory data grid service, and project life cycle management using Apache Maven and Spring framework programming for the Java version of App Engine) mitigate the long-standing obstacles to enterprise adoption of Google's application PaaS.

API-level integration with Google Apps enables the vendor to offer its PaaS capabilities as an upsell to enterprises adopting Google Apps and looking for new ways to extend them using advanced programming. The combined selling of Google Apps (SaaS) and Google Cloud Platform (IaaS and PaaS) is a promising business opportunity.Cautions

Google's limited reputation as an enterprise service provider, in general, and its minimal presence as an enterprise PaaS provider, in particular, have created a perception of Google as a consumer-only vendor. To succeed as an enterprise PaaS provider, Google must overcome this perception.

A strategic focus on cloud services and an absence of on-premises versions of Google software prevent Google from being considered by many mainstream enterprises looking for a hybrid public/private PaaS environment, especially in the early stages of their adoption of the cloud platform model. The few independent attempts at porting App Engine to on-premises (for example, Red Hat CapeDwarf and AppScale) can't alone deliver the viability and functional breadth to match Google cloud services.

Google's early focus on independent Web innovators prevented it from recognizing some of the essential functional requirements of an enterprise-class application platform. Absence of support for application integration, BPM, event processing (although queuing is supported) or legacy migration limits the scope of mainstream enterprise application projects where Google can win business.

A lack of application ISV partners and a modest number of technology ISV partners isolate the vendor's offering and limit its ability to address vertical, geographic and other targeted business cases.IBMIBM PaaS strategy is currently implemented by the IBM SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) offering, available since early 2013. SCAS includes the IBM Web Application Pattern (using the Liberty profile version of the on-premises WebSphere Application Server technology); the IBM Mobile Application Platform Pattern (using IBM Worklight software for mobile application development, deployment and management); support for PHP based on Zend's technology, a message-oriented middleware service (based on WebSphere MQ); DBMS services (based on IBM DB2 UDB technology); application life cycle management services (based on IBM Rational technology); and additional, minor services. IBM's PaaS offering also includes the WebSphere Cast Iron Live integration PaaS, which is not technically or commercially framed in the SCAS offering.To support elastic scaling, SCAS leverages the same pattern technology used by the IBM Workload Deployer private PaaS-enabling appliance and the IBM PureApplication "PaaS in a box" integrated system products. SCAS was originally deployed on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise IaaS platform, but now IBM plans to offer it from the recently acquired SoftLayer infrastructure services.

In June 2013, IBM released the technical preview of the next generation of its PaaS strategy based on the offering called BlueMix, which is based on the open-source Cloud Foundry and OpenStack technologies. While SCAS Web Application Pattern deploys as a cloud-based high-control shared-OS aPaaS, BlueMix will inherit from Cloud Foundry the more agile shared-OS model of elasticity (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy").Strengths

IBM's large and loyal installed base, ample partner network, and the popularity and credibility of its on-premises application infrastructure offerings — coupled with its strong professional services and outsourcing businesses — provide the vendor with plenty of opportunities and channels to cross-sell its aPaaS offerings.

The rich set of capabilities provided by SCAS, and the compatibility with its popular WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, DB2 UDB and Rational products, makes the IBM PaaS an attractive option for IBM clients and partners wanting to move established applications into a public cloud environment.

The full compatibility of the pattern technology between SCAS, IBM Workload Deployer (IWD) and IBM PureApplication provides user organizations and ISVs with a compatible and integrated application platform to support public, private and hybrid cloud scenarios.

BlueMix will be based on a "mobile first" approach and will target what IBM qualifies as "system of engagement" (front-end) types of applications by providing support for mobile application development, Java EE (limited to the Web profile), Ruby, Node.js, a variety of open-source DBMSs, AMQP, in-memory data management, big data support, analytics, DevOps support, and rich monitoring, management and tracking capabilities. These characteristics and the extensive use of open-source technology will make the BlueMix-derived PaaS attractive for a wide range of user organizations outside of IBM's traditional large enterprise customer base.Cautions

The installed base of IBM SCAS is estimated to be fewer than 50 clients worldwide, thus reflecting the limited sales resources deployed by IBM to promote and sell its PaaS offering, at least until the vendor recently announced expansion of sales support for the offering.

The marketing programs implemented so far by IBM don't seem to be in line with the investment required to support a strategic PaaS offering. SCAS visibility in the market is very low, even among the most loyal IBM clients and partners, which is an obvious obstacle to more widespread adoption of the offering.

IBM hinted that the BlueMix-derived PaaS offering (expected to be generally available sometime in 2014) will complement SCAS, but also that the two offerings will merge. However, the vendor has not yet provided any details as to how and when this will take place. The resulting uncertainty about the evolution of the SCAS road map may confuse user organizations and partners, and may cast doubt about the future of the current offering.

Users testified to SCAS's full compatibility with the corresponding on-premises platforms, but given the small installed base, its suitability for large and business-critical deployments is not fully proven. Prospects should run extensive tests and proofs of concept (POCs) to make sure the platform can address their requirements.Indra gnubilaIndra gnubila is the software and cloud services business unit of Indra, a large Spanish system integrator operating in about 140 countries, deriving from the acquisition of gnubila, a small Spanish company. The vendor's G application platform is available as an on-premises, cloud-enabled software product (via both open-source license and as a supported product), and in the form of a high-control, cloud-native, shared-everything aPaaS (a rare combination of characteristics).The G platform supports Java EE, .NET, Ruby, PHP and Perl containers, and provides additional capabilities atop the core application server platform, including mobile app support; a graph-oriented, in-memory multitenant DBMS (Gdb); big data capabilities; a form manager; human workflow, document management; reporting and data integration features.The aPaaS rendition of the G technology is available on top of AWS, IBM SmartCloud, Microsoft Azure and Indra's FlexIT IaaS platforms.

Strengths Indra gnubila's technology reflects the vendor's outstanding insight in cloudiness — its aPaaS is one of a

few cloud application platforms that are both cloud-native (the containers for processing and the database are elastic and multitenant) and high control (supporting third-generation language [3GL] programming for advanced system development or migration of existing applications to the cloud). Most of the vendor's cloud-native competitors are proprietary, and most of its high-control competitors are cloud-based and use relatively coarse shared-OS or shared-hardware elasticity (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy").

Indra gnubila's aPaaS provides an advanced and rich set of application platform capabilities, fully compatible with the on-premises version of the technology, which enables user organizations to address a wide variety of use cases on top of a shared-everything, elastically scalable cloud infrastructure supporting a variety of enterprise-class, high-availability disaster recovery, monitoring, security and SLA arrangements.

The vendor's aPaaS provides extensive features to support third-party ISVs willing to develop, deploy and sell SaaS applications on top of it, such as compatibility with Java EE and .NET, fast application cloning, an ample set of DevOps APIs, an application marketplace, flexible billing module, and integration with a variety of payment gateways. These features have been leveraged by other Indra business units to cloud-enable their software products and make the platform attractive to ISVs moving toward a SaaS model.

Availability of the platform on a variety of IaaS platforms, planned to be further extended over the next 12 months, in addition to compatibility with the on-premises version, allows maximum deployment flexibility for user organizations and opens partnership opportunities for gnubila.Cautions

Indra gnubila's installed base amounts to approximately 100 clients, mostly in Spain. Although the business unit has almost doubled its aPaaS clients during the past 12 months, the potential sales synergy with Indra has not fully manifested outside of Spain. Therefore, gnubila's still limited ability to address international markets makes the platform scarcely appealing for global organizations.

Despite being in the market for almost 10 years (under different ownerships), the gnubila platform suffers from a limited market awareness, including in its own home country. Although the acquisition by Indra potentially provides gnubila with the resources needed to improve its marketing plans, this potential has still to unfold.

Indra gnubila's users mention the platform look and feel and reporting features as areas in need of improvement. Technical support delivered from Colombia (where the platform is largely developed) may prove challenging for clients based in other time zones. While Indra's global support gears up, these issues may alienate the interest of prospects looking for advanced user interactions, and may be an obstacle for the implementation of projects with an international scale.

The offering's road map doesn't include support for some important emerging technology trends, such as complex-event processing and API management.MendixMendix is a small, but well-established, provider of the Mendix App Platform, a high-productivity, shared-OS multitenant cloud application development and deployment platform. The Mendix App Platform includes a development environment, the Mendix Business Modeler, that can be used as a cloud service or downloaded to the developer's computer (in either case, application metadata is stored in a cloud-resident repository). The Mendix App Platform is available as a private hosted offering or as a public aPaaS.Strengths

Mendix was among the first vendors to establish itself in the high-productivity aPaaS market. The vendor has proven capabilities as a model-driven, high-productivity platform. It offers a mature and

comprehensive "no code" development capability that allows the delivery of highly capable applications without writing 3GL code.

Mendix offers subtenancy support that allows ISVs to use Mendix App Platform as the foundation for the SaaS services that they build.

The Mendix application development software has mature support for the integration required to deliver composite applications and to synchronize data among several systems.Cautions

The current Mendix aPaaS architecture is based on shared-OS multitenancy, built on Linux containers. This approach represents one of the easier paths to multitenancy, but it doesn't offer the same level of resource sharing that is available to cloud-native aPaaS providers, which consequently enjoy lower infrastructure costs that can be passed on to customers as lower prices.

The Mendix approach to elasticity is not as automatic as some of the other aPaaS offerings, meaning that operators must attend to usage metrics on an ongoing basis for applications that may encounter spikes in use.

While Mendix has an established aPaaS business, it is still a small player in this market and will face increasing challenges as the large infrastructure software vendors like IBM, Software AG, Microsoft and Tibco ratchet up their aPaaS efforts.MicrosoftMicrosoft's offering, Windows Azure, has evolved into an environment that supports IaaS and PaaS models. As a result of adding full IaaS capabilities, as well as fleshing out its private cloud strategy, the vendor now provides the onramps that are making PaaS much more approachable for enterprises.The vendor's approach is to focus on a "cloud first" push toward frequent updates and an aggressive approach to features and enhancements. Its long-term goal is to deliver the full range of .NET application infrastructure capabilities as Azure PaaS services. Its PaaS capabilities go beyond aPaaS and include its SQL Database (dbPaaS) as well as messaging middleware services (Windows Azure Service Bus), in-memory data grid services (Windows Azure Cache) and iPaaS (Windows Azure BizTalk Services). It has also recently added Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud mobile back-end service offering that supports multiple clients beyond its own mobile client strategy. Its presence in other cloud environments (for example, SaaS through Dynamics CRM Online and Office 365, including SharePoint Online) also contributes to the vendor's broad cloud strategy.Windows Azure combines IaaS and PaaS capabilities in a common, colocated suite of services. Windows Azure Cloud Services is Microsoft's cloud-based, high-control, shared-hardware aPaaS offering. The more recent Windows Azure Web Sites is a separately standing shared-OS aPaaS intended for relatively simple Web-facing applications.Strengths

Windows developers and those familiar with .NET languages and constructs find Azure a comfortable, compatible environment to work in. This brings opportunities for millions of developers and is a natural target for established Windows ISVs.

The focus on mirroring capabilities and private cloud (Microsoft Cloud OS) means that enterprises can use Azure knowing that it integrates well with their existing environments and that they may have the option, in some cases, to run their applications in-house or on Azure.

Microsoft's vision is comprehensive, including support for integration BPM, in-memory computing, messaging and other functionality offered as cloud services in conjunction with its core aPaaS. Additionally, Azure's services include the fast-growing IaaS and PaaS, allowing developers to use the right level of abstraction and to use both simultaneously in the same project.

Azure supports Node.js, Java, PHP, Python and other environments besides .NET (including Linux in IaaS), enabling developers with backgrounds other than pure Microsoft to join the Azure environment in an attempt to broaden its addressable market.Cautions

Microsoft's offerings lack model-driven, graphics-based high-productivity development support (Visual Studio productivity tools notwithstanding). Its xRM capabilities (part of Dynamics CRM) have the potential to be utilized in conjunction with Windows Azure, but the vendor does not actively promote it.

Microsoft is facing uncertainty due to company leadership issues and regarding its core desktop and Office businesses that may cause distractions. Spreading its efforts across a wide range of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings dilutes focus.

The goal of mirroring capabilities across Azure and Windows Server is a work in progress, and marketing promises are ahead of current product realities.

MIOsoftMIOsoft MIOedge is a shared-OS, cloud-native, high-productivity application PaaS. The vendor also offers MIOceap, a cloud-enabled application platform (using MIOedge software) that is deployed privately in the data center of the customer's choice, but is managed by MIOsoft. It also includes MIOhub, a multifaceted big data store using Apache Hadoop combined with MIOdb (including a workflow server) and a NoSQL context database, extended with data integration and analytics tools. MIOhub's contextual analytics platform also is available as a cloud service or as software for private deployment.Strengths

Strategic investment in big data management (offering variety through support of multiple data formats, models and sources; velocity through support of sensor and other event streams; and volume through the ability to absorb petabytes of incoming data), data integration and context-aware analytics, including support for parallel processing and in-memory computing, differentiates the vendor from most aPaaS competitors. Its vision for transactional context-aware enterprise computing is market-leading.

High-productivity development tools feature easy-to-learn-and-use graphical design of business applications and business analytics, producing high-performance, parallelized and in-memory transactional/analytical cloud-native applications with Web or mobile user interfaces. Application designers need not be experts in advanced cloud computing architecture to create advanced cloud computing applications.

Support of integrated public, managed private and virtual private delivery of the platform enables IT organizations to build hybrid and distributed applications. Customers choose locations for the data, the degree of its distribution, and the degree of control over different segments of their business data and data processing.

Several hundred paying enterprise customers (although not all using the public cloud version of the suite); the use of MIOsoft-controlled colocated data centers in multiple geographical locations, in addition to support of multiple public IaaS platforms; the focus on ISVs and on building a SaaS ecosystem; and a 99.9% availability SLA are strong indications of the vendor's commitment to meeting demanding enterprise computing requirements.Cautions

A focus on advanced NoSQL/Hadoop analytical data models makes the platform less suitable for simple transactional applications using a basic relational data model (although the platform supports the more advanced combined transactional and analytical processing in MIOdb).

Minimal name recognition reflects the limited ability of the vendor to market and reach its addressable market. It also keeps MIOsoft off many longlists and denies it many opportunities to compete. Many paying customers use MIOsoft technology on-premises, further reducing its exposure as a cloud services provider.

The proprietary encoding of business logic (graphics and proprietary scripting language) translates to a vendor lock-in and can prevent adoption by some mainstream IT organizations. Although Java and JavaScript programming are supported and the UML standard is used in application modeling, the overall productivity tooling and execution framework remain proprietary.NTT CommunicationsNTT Communications is a large, well-recognized, proven global sourcing and carrier service provider with headquarters in Tokyo and many regional offices globally. NTT Communications Cloudn PaaS is a high-control aPaaS. It is based on a cloud-based shared-OS PaaS architecture. The service leverages Pivotal Cloud Foundry and has cloud characteristics added. The vendor introduced Cloudn PaaS in April 2013 and acquired approximately 500 customers during the service's first six months of availability.Strengths

Cloudn PaaS supports multiple application server containers (Tomcat 6 and Resin) and multiple languages (including Java, Node.js, Ruby and multiple frameworks [Spring, Play]), and it provides a Cloud Foundry Eclipse plug-in for development. Its open-source-software-based openness provides portability, minimizes vendor lock-in and strongly promotes the open PaaS movement by itself.

Cloudn PaaS offers a broad set of services with AWS-compatible APIs (for example, autoscaling, monitoring, provisioning and multiple kinds of compute services). This enables a high-control aPaaS environment to provide a platform for development with high-productivity features.

Cloudn PaaS runs in Japanese data centers owned and operated by NTT Communications with high availability (i.e., an SLA of 99.99%) and proven customer satisfaction. In the next 12 months, Cloudn PaaS will be available in more regions, such as the U.S. and the Asia/Pacific region.

Over the next 12 months, NTT Communications plans to provide Enterprise Cloud PaaS for the virtual private cloud, which shares the same technology as the enabling technology of CloudnPaaS. This will enable a hybrid PaaS with bidirectional application portability between Cloudn PaaS and Enterprise Cloud PaaS.Cautions

As of November 2013, NTT Communications sells its aPaaS offering to Japanese companies only. Although it plans to expand its business into the U.S., Asia/Pacific region and EMEA during the next 12 months, its go-to-market strategy to reach the global market is still under development, and its current offering may be less attractive against the leading players in those regions.

NTT Communications is at a stage of developing its influence in the application infrastructure market such that, in order to attract enterprise customers, it needs to form much broader partner ecosystems.

Cloud Foundry, the software technology for Cloudn PaaS, is at a phase of developing its presence and influence in demanding enterprise users (especially, in Japan) such that it needs to prove its capability by increasing its track record to develop and run new mission-critical applications in production.

To broaden its appeal to more advanced and competitive enterprise software projects, NTT Communications Cloudn PaaS needs to expand support for a broader set of application server containers, advanced technologies (such as in-memory data grid [IMDG] or complex-event processing [CEP]) and/or growing requirements (for example, big data analytics, mobile, social computing and machine-to-machine [M2M]).ProgressIn June 2013, Progress acquired Rollbase, an established, high-productivity, cloud-native shared-container aPaaS. At the time of the Rollbase acquisition, Progress announced Progress Pacific, a vision for a comprehensive, multifunctional set of PaaS offerings that, when completed, will combine Rollbase with other Progress technologies, including Corticon (for business rule processing), a retained copy of Savvion's BPM software (when Progress sold Savvion, it retained rights to a then-current copy of the Savvion BPM software), DataDirect Cloud (for access to and integration with multiple legacy data sources, as well as relational DBMSs, big data stores, social sites and cloud data services) and OpenEdge (an on-premises fourth-generation [4GL] that has been used extensively by ISVs to create packaged applications).Strengths

To best enable ISV customers, Progress Pacific offers a shared-everything multitenancy model that natively supports subtenancy. In other words, Pacific provides multitenancy for multiple developers. Then, each of these developers can build applications and make those applications available to their own customers (each of which can have multiple users).

Progress has a well-established ISV business with its OpenEdge product. With the ability to leverage this customer base, as well as the ability to leverage the vendor's demonstrated knowledge regarding how to sell and market to ISVs, it has an advantage over most competitors in the aPaaS market. Since one of the keys to vendor success in the aPaaS market will be the ability of Progress to encourage the development of SaaS offerings on top of its aPaaS, this is a notable point of leverage for Progress.

With Progress' several established on-premises software businesses, Progress Pacific can leverage mature capabilities in several important application development areas (for example, business rule processing and BPM, as well as data access to legacy and social data sources).

The core of Pacific is mature in that Rollbase was founded in 2007. Also, Rollbase can port some Force.com applications away from salesforce.com's aPaaS, helping users avoid being locked in to salesforce.com. On the road map for Progress Pacific is the ability for developers to write code in JavaScript (the extension language in Rollbase), ABL (the fourth-generation proprietary OpenEdge language), basic Java or other languages, and then run those applications on-premises as well as in the cloud.

Cautions Although it has had long-standing success with selling to ISVs and their midmarket customers, Progress

has had less success selling to large end-user enterprises. Success with aPaaS will require skills in both ends of the market.

The integration of the Rollbase, OpenEdge, Corticon, DataDirect and Savvion codebases is a challenging undertaking. While Progress has completed part of this effort, the considerable R&D effort required may, at least temporarily, lower the vendor's investment in some other areas, such as sales and marketing.

A recent major reorganization, along with a sell-off of previously acquired application integration and other middleware assets, creates a sense of uncertainty concerning the vendor's ability to execute on its strategy, which must be overcome.Red HatRed Hat is a leading provider of the open-source Linux OS technology (Red Hat Enterprise Linux [RHEL]) and the open-source JBoss family of middleware products. The vendor has utilized these to enter the aPaaS market with its high-control, cloud-based, shared-OS OpenShift Online offering, and also offers an on-premises CEAP called OpenShift Enterprise, which can be used by IT organizations to create a private PaaS environment. Red Hat leverages its expertise in Linux, Java and security to make its offerings attractive to enterprises. It features a cartridge mechanism for supporting many interchangeable plug-in middleware environments and languages. Currently, most Red Hat OpenShift usage is as a CEAP, but its aPaaS offering is gaining customers.Strengths

Red Hat's open-source, Linux and Java history and expertise make it a good choice for those looking for familiar Java programming for cloud computing.

The comprehensive suite of middleware offerings on-premises (including integration, BPM, portal, rule management, event processing, in-memory computing and others) creates the basis for a comprehensive multifunctional PaaS offering over time.

OpenShift Enterprise and OpenShift Online use the same codebase, and offer the flexibility and choice to deploy in the cloud and in the enterprise's data center.

Red Hat has been working quietly with Google on the CapeDwarf project, which aims to bridge the gap between Google's cloud-native App Engine and Red Hat's enterprise-native JBoss/OpenShift worlds.Cautions

A lack of model-driven high-productivity tools for OpenShift aPaaS will compel the many prospects (including LOB) that choose cloud services over on-premises software, and expect faster results and ease of use, to look elsewhere.

Reliance on partners for mobile, device event streaming, and big data management and analytics means that enterprises looking for advanced strategic offerings from their PaaS provider will look elsewhere today.

Despite more than two years of pre-general-availability, OpenShift Online by Red Hat is new as a generally available offering and there are currently few paying customers. Red Hat's viability as a cloud services provider is not yet well-established.salesforce.comSalesforce.com is a cloud computing pioneer offering a market-leading SaaS since 1999 and a market-leading PaaS since 2007. The vendor's flagship aPaaS offering has been and remains Force.com, a cloud-native, high-productivity, shared-everything cloud platform service. Recently, salesforce.com announced Salesforce1 Platform, which joins Force.com with Heroku1 and a collection of other platform-related capabilities. Force.com is built around a proprietary, high-scale, cloud-native relational DBMS, available also as the Database.com service (dbPaaS). This is the same database that underlies salesforce.com applications.The vendor also offers Heroku that is a separately standing, multilingual, shared-OS, cloud-based, high-control aPaaS offering. Heroku was acquired by salesforce.com in 2010 and runs on an AWS network of data centers supporting multiple open-source languages and frameworks. The new Heroku1 includes a data synchronization bridge (utilizing technology of the just-acquired cloudconnect). It automates access by Heroku-based applications to the massive (though still remote) salesforce.com SaaS and PaaS databases. The Force.com command line interface (CLI), for the first time, enables developers to interact

with both Force.com and Heroku environments via an integrated CLI. The basic Heroku platform, as well as Force.com and Database.com, remain available apart from the new Salesforce1 and Heroku1 suites of services.Other notable components of Salesforce1 Platform include AppExchange (an app store listing native Force.com, Heroku and interconnected external applications); Communities and Chatter (a social computing capability); Identity (for security and single-sign-on support); and development tools, SDKs and API libraries for mobile, Web and service-oriented application development. Everything salesforce.com offers is available exclusively as a cloud service. There is no deployable software version of Salesforce1 Platform or any of its components.Strengths

The vendor is by far the largest provider in the enterprise aPaaS market, with fast-growing revenue and a fast-growing user base and application count, combined with the longest strategic and successful presence in the cloud application and platform markets. This gives salesforce.com the name recognition and reputation that, for many prospects, translate to a safe choice in the otherwise immature and unsettled PaaS market.

Continuing innovation over the years produced the offering with a broad portfolio of capabilities to create applications that are mobile, social and highly scalable, with identity management, flow control and portal capabilities. The platform is open for interoperability via multiple classes of APIs, including REST, SOAP, streaming and batch. With the planned support for device streams, some big data analytics and the expansion of the mobile application architecture and identity management, salesforce.com is ahead of most of its competitors in tracking the leading industry trends.

Dedicated support for ISVs in Salesforce1 Platform and in the vendor's business model recognizes the critical importance of the ecosystem of partners to the success of a platform offering, and helps salesforce.com broaden the channels and market presence for its platform.

Market-leading success of salesforce.com SaaS offerings creates a massive channel for the upselling of Salesforce1 Platform; for many projects building extensions around salesforce.com SaaS, use of Force.com is a natural choice, enabling the vendor to command premium prices and increase users' lock-in with its offerings.Cautions

The proprietary nature of the Force.com platform deters adoption by many independent application development projects seeking to avoid vendor lock-in and prevents application migration projects from utilizing the platform.

Minimal integration between Heroku and Force.com, beyond the levels available through public APIs, leaves the Heroku offering in the shadow of its "big brother" (Force.com), neither fully independent nor fully integrated. The new Heroku1 is aimed at mitigating this challenge, but the new technology implementing bidirectional synchronization between the open-source Heroku Postgres and proprietary Database.com is technically challenging and still has to be proven to be useful, dependable and manageable before it becomes an established solution.

The lack of an on-premises option leaves the many enterprise organizations looking for a portable hybrid cloud platform environment outside the vendor's addressable market.

The well-established identity of salesforce.com as a SaaS provider creates the perception of its platform offering as secondary, leading many advanced enterprise application projects to look elsewhere for a suitable technology and business partner. The Salesforce1 Platform initiative is aimed at addressing this issue. Changing or extending a brand identity is a difficult undertaking. Its success will require the aggressive marketing of supporting success stories and further technology investments.SAPThe SAP PaaS strategy is framed in the SAP Hana Cloud Platform offering, which includes an eponymous aPaaS; a portal PaaS (SAP Hana Cloud Portal); SAP Mobile Platform, Enterprise Edition, Cloud Version; an iPaaS (SAP Hana Cloud Integration); analytics capabilities (SAP Lumira Cloud); collaboration (SAP Jam); and an in-memory DBMS PaaS (SAP Hana One on AWS).The core aPaaS component of SAP Hana Cloud Platform is a high-control, cloud-based, shared-hardware cloud platform. It supports a Java container providing compatibility with the Java EE 6 Web Profile, relational DBMS (based on the open-source MaxDB technology), an in-memory DBMS (based on the SAP

Hana database) service, and a connectivity service to integrate point-to-point with back-end SAP and non-SAP on-premises applications.Strengths

Integrated support with the SAP Hana in-memory DBMS enables user organizations and ISVs to develop innovative applications that would be difficult or even impossible to implement using traditional techniques.

Support for popular open standards (such as Java EE); compatibility with SAP on-premises NetWeaver Java Application Server, which enables hybrid architectures; native integration with SAP communications protocols (via the connectivity service); and colocation (and embedded capabilities to enable integration) with SAP SaaS offerings make SAP Hana Cloud Platform an attractive proposition for user organizations and ISVs looking for an aPaaS to extend SAP application offerings on the basis of fully cloud-based or hybrid cloud/on-premises architectures.

The road map for SAP aPaaS includes support for server-side JavaScript and a rapid application development tool; a rich set of DevOps APIs; REST/OData API publishing and API management; the opening of the rich set of SAP Hana database capabilities (for example, predictive analytics and event processing) enabled by the server-side, high-productivity, platform-independent proprietary River Definition Language; elastic scaling; and improved security, high availability and disaster recovery. Once these capabilities are available, they will make the offering attractive for a larger number of use cases.

Positioning of SAP Hana Cloud Platform as the platform of choice for future SAP SaaS and other cloud services adds credibility to the offering and will likely attract investments from SAP's loyal partners.Cautions

SAP Hana Cloud Platform has fewer than 100 clients and, despite the positive experience reported by some users in terms of availability, ease of use and self-service, its viability as a platform for large-scale, enterprise-class or global-class deployments is still uncertain.

The vendor has identified SAP Hana Cloud Platform as a major marketing theme for 2014. However, the platform's visibility in the marketplace is still very low and, often, not even long-term, and loyal SAP clients are aware of it. The decision to use the Hana brand, although likely to pay off in the long run, may confuse prospects and potential partners, which still primarily associate the Hana tag only with SAP's in-memory database technology.

The development environment for SAP Hana Cloud Platform is an Eclipse-based, on-premises tool, but the on-premises testing environment doesn't include the SAP Hana database, which makes testing tricky for applications that use the SAP in-memory DBMS capability of SAP's aPaaS.

Support for cloud capabilities is still quite limited (for example, no autoscaling). This, coupled with the availability of the platform on only two data centers (in Europe and the U.S.), with more planned for the future, is an indication of a still maturing offering that may not be suitable to address global business-critical deployments.Software AGIn the aPaaS market, Software AG offers AgileApps Live, based on the recently acquired aPaaS technology and service of LongJump. AgileApps Live is a shared-everything, cloud-native, high-productivity application PaaS. The AgileApps technology is also available as software for private cloud and ISV use. AgileApps Live is part of the announced Software AG Live initiative (also referred to as "unified PaaS"). The vendor's strategic cloud initiative also includes the Process Live bpmPaaS and the future (in 2014) integration service (Integration Live iPaaS), using the company's well-established on-premises webMethods and Aris software, adapted and extended for the cloud. Finally, Software AG also offers the Portfolios Live application service, designed to manage enterprise software assets.Strengths

The vendor's high-productivity cloud platform is attractive to LOB developers and many IT projects. When combined with the forthcoming business process modeling and management and cloud services integration capabilities, Software AG is in a position to offer a multifunction enterprise cloud platform service for mainstream enterprise projects.

The combination of a long-standing aPaaS from the former LongJump (established in 2003) and the business and financial resources of Software AG (an enterprise software vendor since 1969) creates the potential for accelerated growth of the combined companies in the enterprise PaaS market.

Established market leadership in the application integration and BPM software markets (webMethods, Aris), and legacy high-productivity application platforms (Natural), gives Software AG cloud road map credibility in the application infrastructure and enterprise computing markets, which many of its PaaS competitors lack.

Availability of the platform as both service and software is the foundation for a hybrid private/public aPaaS, which is the preferred approach by many mainstream IT organizations in the early stages of adoption of PaaS.Cautions

A lack of experience in the cloud computing markets at the core of Software AG company leadership and the limited market success of LongJump may challenge the vendor's ability to market, sell and evolve its PaaS offerings, as well as the development of an effective business model for PaaS.

The lack of name recognition for Software AG or AgileApps in cloud computing (including PaaS) markets, combined with a minimal SaaS partner ecosystem, will be a challenge that Software AG will have to overcome while facing both enterprise and cloud megavendors either entering or already established in the PaaS market.

A focus on high productivity attracts certain projects and developers; however, without a high-control, backward-compatible alternative, the company will miss opportunities with advanced enterprise cloud computing projects, enterprise application migration projects, development/test engagements and IT organizations willing to forgo high productivity to avoid vendor lock-in.

The relatively conservative initial road map for the evolution of Software AG Live focused on cloud fundamentals first (development, integration, workflow management) and left the vendor, in the short term, without leading-edge capabilities for native mobile applications; management of volume and variety of big data; device and sensor event streams in support of Internet of Things; and business analytics, which have emerged as common demands of the advanced enterprise software initiatives. (Some support of the mobile user interface for AgileApps Live and an updated cloud services road map are expected in 2014.)WSO2WSO2 is a small, but established, open-source software vendor that delivers a comprehensive array of on-premises software for development, deployment and management of service-oriented architecture (SOA)-style applications (see "Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Platforms" and "Magic Quadrant for On-Premises Application Integration Suites"). Based in California, and with development resources in Sri Lanka (the company's origin), WSO2 has created its PaaS offerings by packaging its on-premises products as "cartridges" for its innovative Stratos cloud management platform, an open- source cloud management platform. (WSO2 contributed Stratos to Apache as an open-source project.) The vendor's current cloud services include WSO2 App Cloud (a cloud-based, shared-OS, high-control aPaaS, which includes WSO2 App Factory, an application life cycle management platform), WSO2 Integration Cloud (iPaaS) and WSO2 API Cloud (a cloud API management service).Strengths

The vendor's PaaS architecture enables it to continue to deliver components of its comprehensive array of on-premises software as cloud services, including complex-event processing, BPM, business rule processing, identity management, mobile application development and data access services.

WSO2's PaaS architecture, with its plug-in cartridge model, can be used by the vendor's partners and customers to cloud-enable some other products (such as MySQL, Tomcat or PHP) by packaging them as Stratos cartridges.

WSO2 supports both multitenancy and subtenancy (where some subscribers of WSO2 services, such as SaaS ISVs, establish their own subscribers). This will enable WSO2 to eventually build an ecosystem of SaaS partners and to support some advanced enterprise IT use patterns.

WSO2 App Cloud delivers DevOps development/deployment capabilities as a cloud service, enabling streamlined application delivery in support of agile development processes. WSO2 App Cloud also provides an app store and social computing capabilities to enable and encourage collaboration among developers.

Cautions WSO2 Public Cloud was launched as an online preview in October 2013. WSO2's initial aPaaS entry,

WSO2 StratosLive, will be retired when WSO2 Public Cloud becomes generally available, planned for the end of 1Q14. The reintroduced WSO2 cloud services have yet to be proven with a substantial number of enterprise customers.

While WSO2 has had some success in establishing itself in the on-premises application infrastructure markets, it is still a small company with a limited physical presence in mostly second- and third-tier markets.

Although the vendor can point to months with 99.97% uptime, its uptime guarantee is only 95%, which is substantially lower than the SLA commitments of most of its competitors (although some make no commitment at all). This may dampen interest from prospects needing to deploy business-critical applications.

WSO2 Public Cloud does not contain all components required to support advanced enterprise application development, as it does not provide business activity monitoring, complex-event processing or support for big data management or analytics.

Vendors Added and DroppedWe review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.This is the inaugural edition of the Magic Quadrant for the enterprise aPaaS market, so no vendors have been added or dropped. We plan to refresh this research annually and, each time, will update the market definition, the inclusion and evaluation criteria, and the weights of the criteria to reflect current market conditions. As the result, some vendors that are featured in this research may no longer qualify, and others that, at one time, did not meet the inclusion criteria may then be included.

Inclusion and Exclusion CriteriaTo be included in this research, a vendor must deliver a service with the following characteristics:

1. It has to be a cloud service:o Available by subscription and accessible over Internet technologieso Available uniformly to all qualified subscriberso With some built-in sharing of physical resources between logically isolated tenants

(subscribers or applications)o With some built-in self-service provisioning and management by subscriberso With some built-in bidirectional scaling, without interruption of activities and with some

automationo With some built-in instrumentation for tracking of operations

2. It has to be a PaaS:o Encapsulates the underlying virtual or physical machines — and their procurement,

management and direct costs — and does not require subscribers to be aware of them3. It has to be an aPaaS:

o Allows deployment and execution of encoded application logico Includes development tools for encoding of application logic and some management of the

application life cycle4. It has to be enterprise-grade and aimed at enterprise IT users:

o Includes some support for high availability and disaster recoveryo Provides some technical support to paying subscriberso Includes some provisions for securing access to application serviceso Enables formation of SOA-style service APIs for external access to application logic and/or

datao Allows invocation of external service APIs

5. It has to have been generally available as of 31 July 2013.

The aPaaS market is rapidly changing (see "Risks and Opportunities of PaaS at the Peak of Inflated Expectations"). This research represents a snapshot in time. Multiple vendors in the cloud platform market do not appear because they did not have a generally available offering, have not yet implemented sufficient cloudiness or did not target enterprise-style software projects by 31 July 2013. Some of the vendors in this category include:

AT&T CenturyLink (AppFog) CloudJee Dell Fujitsu HP Oracle OrangeScape OutSystems Pivotal ServiceNow Zoho

We recommend that you examine these vendors' offerings in addition to those evaluated in this Magic Quadrant. Many may have advanced to meet your cloud application PaaS requirements.All vendors in the market will be examined again for the 2015 refresh of this Magic Quadrant.

Evaluation CriteriaAbility to ExecuteGartner analysts evaluate technology providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable IT provider performance to be competitive, efficient and effective, and to positively impact revenue, retention and reputation. Ultimately, technology providers are judged on their ability and success in capitalizing on their vision.

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing Low

Market Responsiveness/Record Medium

Marketing Execution Medium

Customer Experience High

Operations Low

Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Source: Gartner (January 2014)To evaluate the functional capabilities of vendors' available enterprise aPaaS offerings, we examined the vendor's current services and its record in the market for the following characteristics:

Degree of cloudiness: Including tenant isolation; sharing of resources; elasticity; scaling; self-service; and instrumentation for tracking, scaling and billing. (Standard)

Enterprise worthiness: Including high availability; disaster recovery; business continuity; accountability and tracking; compliance; continuous technical support; secure access; protection of data integrity and privacy; access to enterprise resources in the cloud, on-premises and with business partners; internationalization and localization; and support of multichannel and composite architectures. (Standard)

Functional completeness (breadth of offering): Functionality of an application platform, including the runtime execution container for encoded application logic with both user and programmatic interfaces; access to data management and persistence; support of composition of both internal and external services; event messaging; and relevant development and life cycle management tools. (Standard)

Openness: Including the choice of on-/off-premises application deployment; backward compatibility; support of standards (de facto or de jure); use of open-source components; and portability with third-party on- and off-premises platforms. (High)

Developers' productivity and ease of operation: Including ease of learning and use of the programming model and tools; usability by LOB citizen developers; and productivity for advanced developers, life cycle managers and IT operations staff. (High)

SOA support: Including exposure of application functionality via APIs; ability to invoke external APIs; and central API management. (High)

Completeness of VisionGartner analysts evaluate technology providers on their ability to convincingly articulate logical statements about current and future market direction, innovation, customer needs, and competitive forces and how well they map to the Gartner position. Ultimately, technology providers are rated on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunity for the provider.

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

Marketing Strategy Medium

Sales Strategy Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy High

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Innovation Medium

Geographic Strategy Medium

Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Source: Gartner (January 2014)To evaluate the forward strategy for functional capabilities of vendors' enterprise aPaaS offerings, we examined the available road maps and credibly committed initiatives for the following characteristics:

Degree of cloudiness: Including tenant isolation; sharing of resources; elasticity; scaling; self-service; and instrumentation for tracking, scaling and billing. (High)

Enterprise worthiness: Including high availability; disaster recovery; business continuity; accountability and tracking; compliance; continuous technical support; secure access; protection of data integrity and privacy; access to enterprise resources in the cloud, on-premises and with business partners; internationalization and localization; and support of multichannel and composite architectures. (High)

Functional completeness (breadth of offering): Functionality of an application platform, including the runtime execution container for encoded application logic with both user and programmatic interfaces; access to data management and persistence; support of composition of both internal and external services; event messaging; and relevant development and life cycle management tools. Also includes the emerging requirements for support for big data management; business analytics; integration of social and other external capabilities; Internet of Things; and context-awareness. (High)

Openness: Including the choice of on-/off-premises application deployment; backward compatibility; support of standards (de facto or de jure); use of open-source components; and portability with third-party on- and off-premises platforms. (Standard)

Developers' productivity and ease of operation: Including ease of learning and use of the programming model and tools; usability by LOB citizen developers; and productivity for advanced developers, life cycle managers and IT operations staff. (Standard)

SOA support: Including exposure of application functionality via APIs; ability to invoke external APIs; and central API management. (High)

Quadrant DescriptionsLeaders

Leaders of a market combine an insightful understanding of the realities of the market, a reliable record, the ability to influence the market's direction, the capability to attract and keep a following, and the capacity to lead.In the enterprise aPaaS market, leadership implies an understanding of the demands of the enterprise and the opportunities of cloud computing and a genuine commitment to enterprise cloud computing. A Leader must have demonstrated a market-leading vision and the ability to deliver on that vision. In this new and still emerging market, few vendors have been in it for long enough to demonstrate sustainable leadership, but multiple vendors are advancing in this direction. We expect notable changes in the market by the time this research is refreshed for 2015.A Leader is not always the best choice for a particular enterprise initiative. A focused, smaller vendor can provide excellent support and commitment to individual mainstream customers, especially when geographic or vertical-industry specifics are important. Such a vendor would not be rated as a Leader in the overall market, but within a specific segment, it may be treated as such.ChallengersChallengers in a market excel in their ability to attract a large user following, but this ability is limited to a subset segment of the market. For members of that target audience, Challengers can be treated as Leaders, but that specificity presents a barrier to adoption for those outside the segment.In the enterprise aPaaS market, a Challenger may have a strong proven presence and following in the Web or mobile development market, but lack traction, commitment or insight in the enterprise market. A Challenger must demonstrate a sustained excellence in execution and must have amassed a significant following, which is hard to achieve in this new, still evolving and forming market. Only one vendor is rated as a Challenger in the enterprise aPaaS market this year, but multiple vendors are likely to reach that level of execution in the coming years.A Challenger can evolve into a Leader if it adopts aggressive, innovative strategies to expand to the full-breadth target market.VisionariesVisionaries in a market are innovators that drive the market forward by responding to the emerging leading-edge customer demands and by offering the businesses of their customers' new opportunities to excel. Typically, these vendors appeal to leading-edge customers, and may have minimal mainstream presence or name recognition. Their ability to deliver sustained dependable execution in the mainstream enterprise markets is not sufficiently tested. Note that the vision of a vendor is not expressed just in its technological innovation; insightful understanding of market trends is also required for visionary marketing, sales, product and business management strategies.In the aPaaS market, some visionary vendors are investing in leading-edge enterprise aPaaS services not yet readily adopted by mainstream enterprise customers, including support of big data and stream analytics, the Internet of Things, and native mobile computing. Other Visionaries excel in understanding enterprise demands on the road to cloud adoption and support high-productivity for LOB users; polyglot high-control for IT developers; integration, orchestration and API management for composite application services; and self-service management for hybrid application deployments.Some Visionaries will eventually grow to become Leaders or will be acquired by them (or by Challengers seeking a leadership position in the market). Others will limit their target markets to focus on their core competencies and will become Niche Players, or they will grow in their specialty to become Challengers.Niche PlayersNiche Players in a market typically specialize in a vertical, geographical or functional specialty, therefore addressing only a segment of a market. Neither their execution nor vision is market-leading; often these are vendors in transition from or to other markets, or they may be subject to excessively conservative risk-averse leadership.In the enterprise aPaaS market, many Niche Players are providers that just recently entered the market with only a limited set of capabilities and have not yet articulated a broad vision and road map, either in technology or in go-to-market terms.Niche Players often represent the best choice for a specific category of buyer, or for a particular use case. They typically offer specialized expertise, focused support practices, flexible terms and conditions, and greater dedication to a particular market segment and its customers.

Some Niche Players will improve their ability to execute and evolve into Challengers. Others will discover innovative solutions that attract interest beyond their niche segments and will emerge as Visionaries. Some will look to strengthen and broaden their businesses to challenge the Leaders. In this fast-changing and consolidating market, opportunities exist for all comers.

ContextThe enterprise aPaaS market is formed by vendors aiming to provide enterprise customers with a cloud platform for the development and execution of cloud-based applications and business solutions. The enterprise aPaaS market targets subscribers in enterprise settings, building new software-based solutions, but constrained by enterprise requirements, policies and regulations.This research covers only the vendors aiming at enterprise customers; however, within this category, vendors still differ in multiple dimensions by the way they envision enterprise realities, requirements, opportunities and best practices in cloud computing:

Developer experience (see "Productivity vs. Control: Cloud Application Platforms Must Split to Win"):o High-productivity: Model-driven graphical development environment, typically producing metadata that

is interpreted at runtime. Some programming is possible, but the core of the application is designed graphically and is interpreted at runtime. Typically proprietary and limited to the most common application design patterns. May be suitable for LOB developers. Ensures a certain degree of application cloudiness. Typically not suitable for unique or advanced application designs.

o High-control: Programming environment based on established on-premises models (Java, Ruby, .NET) that allows for the design of more unique and advanced applications than the high-productivity offerings, but also imposes greater responsibilities on the programmer in creating cloud-compatible applications (stateless, scalable, service-oriented, instrumented for management). Ease of use for the developers is same or less than with comparable on-premises projects.

Model of elasticity (see "Gartner Reference Model for Elasticity and Multitenancy"):o Shared hardware: Multiple tenants may share the resources of a physical machine, but each VM is

exclusively dedicated to one tenant. The increment of elasticity is the whole VM image. Isolation is implemented by the virtualization hypervisor. Elasticity is implemented by additional control software.

o Shared OS: Multiple tenants share an instance of a virtual or physical server OS, each exclusively occupying an OS process, isolated via OS containers. The increment of elasticity is a containerized OS process, which is more lightweight than a whole VM, making elasticity more fine-grained and more responsive to changing demands (an OS container can be instantiated faster than a VM and, therefore, can be triggered in response to smaller changes in demand). Isolation is implemented via OS containers. Elasticity is implemented by additional control software.

o Shared container: Multiple tenants share an instance of an application platform (aka application container). The increment of elasticity can be a thread, a segment of real memory, a priority level or a database connector. Fine-grained elasticity is the most efficient in responding to changing demands and in density of the resource utilization. Tenant isolation and resource elasticity are implemented inside the application container.

Architecture (see "What IT Leaders Need to Know About Application PaaS Models and Use Patterns"):o IaaS plus middleware (not PaaS): Subscriber provisions VMs and chooses the middleware technology

deployed over the VMs. Subscriber is partly or fully responsible for configuring, tuning and versioning of middleware and the underlying OS, and pays for the use of IaaS resources as well as for the middleware. Subscriber arranges for scaling (typically at additional costs). Provider does not "hide" the system infrastructure and leaves responsibility for the middleware to the subscriber. Although this is middleware functionality offered off a cloud environment, it is not a PaaS experience (or cost structure) for the subscriber.

Vendors that only offer this category of application platform service (such as Adobe, Amazon and Zend) do not qualify for Gartner's aPaaS market research, although they are the appropriate choice for some less strategic enterprise projects.

o Cloud-based: Tenant isolation and elasticity are implemented by software that manages middleware, not in the middleware itself; therefore, the middleware can remain (nearly) fully backward-compatible. Since middleware is unaware of the cloud, the application designers and programmers must be careful not to

violate multitenant cloud "citizenship" rules (avoid access to system resources and APIs, promptly release unused resources, persist state across invocations, and provide tracking APIs).

o Cloud-native: Middleware itself is designed with cloud-awareness and implements tenant detection, provisioning, isolation, resource allocation and elastic scaling. The programming model supported by the middleware also reflects the cloud context, enforcing cloud compliance of applications.

Scope (see the Private PaaS technology profile in "Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service [PaaS], 2013"):o Public: The aPaaS services are operated by the provider in the data center network of the provider's

choice. Software that executes the application is unavailable for review or change, and is fixed and versioned exclusively by the provider.

o Hybrid: The provider of the public aPaaS also offers the software that enables its public service, as a software product (CEAP) that is deployed and managed on-premises at a data center of the buyer's choice. The software may not be 100% the same, but offers sufficient portability and interoperability for a homogeneous hybrid application PaaS.

o Private: Some vendors (such as ActiveState, Apprenda and Jelastic) offer only a CEAP. They are not service providers and are not covered in this research, but their products should be evaluated along with the hybrid providers' software, if the plan is to develop a separately standing private PaaS.

Target audience (see "What IT Leaders Must Know About the Adoption of Platform as a Service"):o LOB developers: Application PaaS targeting LOB citizen-developers must offer high-productivity graphical

design, and easy reference to application data and services. They offer high-productivity, model-driven design of user interfaces. Typically, LOB developers use these tools in conjunction with a SaaS.

o Enterprise IT developers: aPaaS targeting enterprise IT organizations must support development of one-of-a-kind application services — some would choose high-productivity rapid results, while others would opt for high-control, more advanced programming opportunities. The applications are the tenants of the aPaaS — sharing and competing for the resources between them (see "Understanding Tenancy: Salesforce.com Versus Google.com"). Often, the applications have no tenants of their own and are deployed in the cloud for reasons other than multitenancy (delegating system management, time to results, attractive tools or pricing); however, in some cases, custom IT applications may be used by isolated departments or branches within the subscriber organization, and those become tenants of the application and subtenants of the aPaaS.

o SaaS ISVs: aPaaS targeting SaaS ISVs (a key customer category for aPaaS vendors) must provide full support of subtenancy, because the objective of the ISVs is to sell its application services to independent customers. Successful SaaS ISVs will have thousands of tenants of their own. Support of subtenancy for ISVs includes support of tracking and billing per subtenant, version control of the application that is seamlessly delivered to subtenants, management that allows the ISV to control all subtenants (including scaling, failover, backup/restore, noisy neighbor control and security), and the self-service management that is offered to subtenants. In other words, the experience of a subtenant must, within its scope, be the same as the experience of the tenant (the ISV) itself.

Costs:o Fixed: Priced in proportion to the number of registered users (with some established scope boundaries,

such as the number of data objects, and a ceiling on some physical resources, such as bandwidth or storage, with variable overage costs). Users that are significantly under the use thresholds are paying a premium for the predictable budget exposure and relief from the burden of capacity planning and continuous use tracking. Minimal or no system administration of the service is required of the subscriber.

o Variable: Priced in proportion to use of physical resources (models and techniques of price calculation differ, but all include some floor and ceiling thresholds). Users have an opportunity to align their costs to the patterns of use at the cost of having to engage in continuous use tracking and capacity planning. Users that have a steady 24/7 demand pay a premium for the flexibility that they do not utilize. Some system administration of the service by the subscriber is essential.Users are advised to establish where an aPaaS offering belongs across these categories when evaluating and contrasting vendor candidates. Although a given project may be more sensitive to some of the categories than the others, all will have an impact on the overall experience of the subscriber utilizing a selected service. Understanding this impact in relation to the project objectives is the responsibility of the buyer, which should not be delegated to vendors or advisers because the consequences of a wrong choice can span the spectrum from negligible to severe.

Market OverviewThe enterprise aPaaS market is new and unsettled. Although we identify leaders in this research, long-term, sustained leadership of the market remains open to new players. This unsettled state attracts many new vendors aiming at carving out a market share in a strategic software market. What makes the PaaS market strategic is not necessarily the prospect of immediately high direct revenue, but more the degree of influence and control that a vendor can attain, through a strong position in cloud platforms in the much larger, high-stakes market of cloud computing and cloud-based solutions. The platform defines standards to which solutions adhere; it creates communities of developers and innovating ISVs, which bring about the applications and solutions in the first place; and it establishes ecosystems of partners and customers.These strategic opportunities attract many new vendors to the PaaS market, most of which start by introducing an aPaaS. Many create aPaaS solutions in-house, using their own or public open-source software building blocks (such as Google, Red Hat and WSO2), while some enter through acquisitions (such as Software AG, Progress and CenturyLink; see "Risks and Opportunities of PaaS at the Peak of Inflated Expectations"). Some vendors first introduce an aPaaS as an extension to their proprietary SaaS offerings (such as SAP and salesforce.com), while some introduce aPaaS at first as just a different delivery model for their established on-premises offerings (such as Oracle and Red Hat), and others see aPaaS as an opportunity for breakthrough innovation (such as Indra gnubila, Google and MIOsoft). Some players in this market start out with a broader PaaS vision, of which aPaaS is just an element (such as IBM, Microsoft, Software AG and WSO2), but even those that start out more exclusively focused (such as Google, Engine Yard and CloudBees) must, over time, expand beyond just aPaaS to retain their ability to compete.Enterprise IT users too are coming to the aPaaS market in increasing numbers. With the growing adoption of SaaS by mainstream enterprise business and of IaaS by mainstream enterprise IT, more organizations have become familiar with the benefits of cloud computing and more have become dependent on cloud resources. These initial engagements with SaaS or IaaS have opened the door to utilizing cloud resources more fully. aPaaS is engaged to customize and extend SaaS (and iPaaS — to integrate it with other applications). It is also engaged by users that have become comfortable with the use of IaaS, and now wish to increase their productivity and to delegate more responsibility to the cloud services providers by subscribing directly to application infrastructure (instead of indirectly through the subscription to VMs).As vendors are concentrating on the enterprise aPaaS market to increase their cloud computing market influence, and users are drawn to the aPaaS market to take their commitment to cloud computing one step higher, aPaaS is beginning to fall into the Trough of Disillusionment (see "Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service [PaaS], 2013"). Here, real users face the real benefits and costs of a technology, and discover the benefits to be less spectacular than promised and costs higher than expected. The vendors, too, discover that excellence in the application PaaS market is not a trivial challenge. Acquisitions alone do not ensure success: First, the business model and the culture of vendors' operations must change to increase agility, openness and innovation — before the organization can deliver software that's innovative, open and agile.The market reality check for the users and providers of aPaaS will result in the emergence of long-term standards, best practices and leading vendor offerings during the next three to five years. Gartner's enterprise aPaaS Magic Quadrant, refreshed annually, will track the transformation of this broadly impactful market.