Cloud confusion triggers anemic month for Index of PaaS Activity
I attended the Hosting & Cloud Transformation Summit last week in Vegas. It's the 451 Research confab that feels like it was intended for ISPs but has become a forum for that cloudy (bad pun intended) acronym parade we call PaaS (and many other things). 
It also left me discouraged that as a vendor community we continue to introduce complexity in the form of competing standards that increase the cost and risk of cloud strategies and, ultimately, warn CIOs that although they're ready for the cloud it isn't ready for them. Adoption stats say it all: by the end of 2015 less than 40% of large enterprises will have implemented private, public, or hybrid cloud architectures (source: 451 Research funded by Microsoft). We're living dog years and the transition is taking too long.
I expect SaaS and MSP (managed service provider) growth to be the catalyst that dramatically accelerates adoption. Cloud migration should begin with deployment of targeted SaaS apps then mature with conversion of legacy app portfolios to native PaaS and proliferate with the consolidation of departmental app dev teams into central PaaS-based app dev competencies. I hope the immediate value of SaaS is enough to overcome the challenges of cloud and PaaS. Even the most cynical of CIOs understands that having other people manage your infrastructure leads to more rapid innovation with less risk.
Schizophrenic IPA flat in September on higher stock prices but less news
An anemic 0.37% decrease for the Index of PaaS Activity (IPA) in September is an exact quantification of the cloud and PaaS confusion I saw on display last week. Stock prices (+5.7%) and #PaaS-tagged Tweets (+31.8%) were up while news headlines (-29.7%) and search results (-8.5%) were down. One notable announcement: RedHat (NYSE: RHT) released new tools for its OpenShift PaaS framework as it competes for developers with VMware/Pivotal's Cloud Foundry. Meanwhile, PaaS vendor stock prices led by Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM, +15.2%) and ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW, +15.1% - disclosure: I work at NOW!) were buoyed by strong quarterly results.
