Forrester has released its Wave report on platform-as-a-service providers for 2011. It looks at how these providers serve two different types of user: professional developers and business developers.
By professional developers, Forrester means those that we usually think of as developers: those who actually know programming languages and write code. By business developers, Forrester means business experts who use visual programming tools to snap together applications from existing components.
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Many of the usual suspects, like EngineYard and Makara (owned by VMware), aren’t covered because they are focused mostly on Web, and not enterprise, development. Forrester evaluated PaaS offerings from:
Forrester concluded that Microsoft and Salesforce.com lead the pack for coders with Azure and Force.com respectively. However, Forrester does express some reservation about Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Heroku. The report warns that Heroku could add complexity and confusion to Force.com, and notes that Salesforce.com has not expressed plans to move Heroku to its own cloud from Amazon Web Services.
For business developers, Salesforce.com was the only leader, though Caspio and WorkXpress received high marks for services specifically targeted at this market. The report says the companies didn’t make the “leaders” cut because of “weaker strategy scores typical of new vendors.” We covered Caspio here.
The report emphasizes that the PaaS market is still immature, with new companies springing up constantly and existing companies being acquired.
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