New survey finds demand for PaaS on the rise

A new age of ‘develop your own application’ (DYOA) to meet ever-changing business requirements is driving demand for rapid application development platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies, new research reveals.

According to the survey of 700 IT decision makers in the US, UK, France, Germany, Benelux, Australia, Brazil and Singapore, there is soaring demand for PaaS architecture from organisations looking for faster development and deployment cycles.

A rapid application development PaaS solution allows custom business applications to be quickly developed and deployed using point and click-type tools in a web browser.

As many as 85% of survey respondents said that there is demand within their organisation to reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy applications, highlighting that the DYOA trend is primarily being driven at a business rather than IT level.

Conducted by Vanson Bourne and sponsored by Progress, the research surveyed IT decision makers in a number of key global locations.

It also found that almost three quarters (70%) of the respondents said that they are either already using PaaS solutions for application development or are planning to use them the future.

Demand for rapid application development is coming from the highest levels of the company with 43% reporting the projects were being directed by C-suite influencers, while nearly half (47%) came from existing customers or partners.

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47% of DYOA is being done by sales and marketing teams, the largest percentage among all respondents, while 44%% said finance teams were developing and deploying their own applications.

The study also showed that, largely because of these benefits, the use of PaaS for application development and deployment will continue to be a focus for organisations, with businesses planning to invest an average of $260,653 on this architecture before the end of the year.

“The rise of DYOA is the latest trend to reshape the way we work, riding hot on the tail of ‘bring your own device’ and ‘bring your own application’,” said Matt Robinson, VP of technology at Progress. “It’s never been easier to develop an application that can allow your business, a department, or even a specific individual to be more productive, regardless of your coding skills. There can be little doubt that we’re now living in the age of the citizen developer.

“However, this study shows that, despite the relative ease of today’s application development and deployment processes, there’s still a huge appetite to be able to improve these cycles by making them quicker and better.

The benefits of using a rapid application development PaaS to improve speed and productivity should not be lost in the excitement of the DYOA age, and this research reveals that many are beginning to wake up to the benefits they can provide.”

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Ben Rossi

Ben was Vitesse Media's editorial director, leading content creation and editorial strategy across all Vitesse products, including its market-leading B2B and consumer magazines, websites, research and...