Let's just assume the Index of PaaS Activity (IPA) was triptophaned in November when it slumbered downward 8.0% to 104.3. Stock prices were up a scant 1.1% but all other categories in the index including PaaS-related tweets, job posts, news headlines, and search results slid an average of 2.1%. A massive drop in Tweets with the "#Pass" hashtag led the decline.
Declines in November and December are typical due to light trading volume on the major stock indexes and an overall reluctance by companies to make major announcements during the pre-Thanksgiving through New Year's slowdowns. Call it consumerism trumping consumerization. Holiday slowdown aside, IPA completed its first year up 4.3% having whipsawed between a high of 128.0 in April and a low of 91.8 in December.
A study commissioned by cloud storage vendor TwinStrata found that PaaS adoption grew the fastest in the past year across all cloud initiatives. 37% of respondents have been using cloud computing in some form for at least three years up from 27% in 2012. Chief among obstacles large enterprises (those with more than 1,000 employees) cite to additional cloud adoption are security, cost, performance, reliability, and uptime. Those last two aren't surprising given the black eye PaaS vendor Salesforce.com gave cloud vendors with its three-hour service outage November 15.
Despite the, uh, dark cloud cast by the Salesforce outage, cloud aficionados have reason to rejoice: a study of 153 federal IT executives by IT consultant MeriTalk revealed PaaS has the potential to save the federal government $20 billion a year or nearly a third of its annual IT budget. As government agencies shift the burden of maintaining legacy systems and developing new applications to cloud-based environments, overall support costs will plummet.
PaaS reduces the cost and complexity of every facet of the app dev lifecycle: from demand management through to governance, provisioning, storage, security, versioning, and analysis. If the government, not known for cost efficiency, plans to shave a third of its budget with PaaS, imagine what it will do for the rest of us.
