Survey: IBM Cloud Cited as Fastest Growing Platform-as-a-Service by U.S. Developers

ARMONK, N.Y., May 11, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that developers across the U.S. cited IBM Bluemix as the most used  platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in Enterprise Strategy Group's (ESG) new survey of usage and consideration for PaaS offerings.

According to ESG's analysis of the survey results, Bluemix adoption is growing at a rate 10 times faster on average than the other leading vendors in the PaaS market – gaining two percentage points of penetration per month since entering beta in 2014. Bluemix was also reported as the second most used PaaS overall, with 19 percent of PaaS users surveyed citing it as their primary PaaS.

IBM total cloud revenue --- covering public, private and hybrid engagements --- was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60 percent in first quarter 2015. IBM's cloud delivered as a service business, a subset of the total, includes PaaS.

Among the findings of the survey:

• Bluemix was reported as the most used PaaS among U.S. developers
• Developers and IT managers rank security, availability, scalability, control and productivity among the most important features and characteristics when evaluating and using PaaS platforms
• Private PaaS environments – which IBM offers with Bluemix Dedicated – was reported as the most used and evaluated deployment model
• IBM ranked first among high-productivity development environments in use

"The Platform-as-a-Service market is now experiencing high growth and currently favors well established application development and deployment vendors who provide both PaaS and IaaS capabilities," said Stephen D. Hendrick, principal analyst for application development research at ESG.

All of the respondents in ESG's survey were either using or currently evaluating a PaaS platform – or planned to do so within the next two years. Analyst firm IDC confirms this trend, saying that PaaS will be the fastest-growing area of the cloud market over the next three years*.

This is significant because as developers and IT managers move more of their operations to the cloud, higher-value cloud offerings  --- such as mission critical application development, testing, and deployment --- which are  delivered through PaaS, are beginning to account for a larger percentage of overall cloud spending.

Bluemix combines more than 100 cloud-based development tools from IBM and its partners. The platform delivers pre-packaged code for a range of capabilities – including social, mobile, security, analytics and more – for developers to use in creating their applications.

The ESG survey, which is one of the first analyst reviews to cover public, private and hybrid PaaS offerings together, asked 326 developers and IT managers about their use and evaluation of PaaS – with more than 80 percent of respondents working at an organization that has 500 employees or more. There were 176 were developers and 150 IT managers surveyed – with 227 respondents currently using a PaaS environment and the other 99 evaluating one with the intention of adopting it within 2 years of the survey. For more information about this ESG study see Platform-as-a-Service Usage and Satisfaction Study, April 2015 and Platform-as-a-Service Feature Preference Study, May 2015.

About IBM Cloud Computing 
IBM is the global leader in open enterprise cloud enabling secure data and infrastructure integration in the cloud. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

* IDC Press Release IDC Forecasts Public IT Cloud Services Spending Will Reach $127 Billion in 2018 as the Market Enters a Critical Innovation Stage http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25219014

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SOURCE IBM