The “platform as a service” market—or PaaS, in which cloud companies provide developers with hardware, OS and software tools and libraries—is starting to heat up. IDC predicts it will $14 billion by 2014, and competitors are angling for enterprise wallets.
They’re also bickering constantly on Twitter—most recently last weekend, when a tweet-fight broke out between Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry and Red Hat’s OpenShift over which of the two open-source platforms had more traction. The argument itself wasn’t conclusive, since neither outfit has yet shown major headway in PaaS in the only way that matters, with revenue and customers.
But it’s a big sign of things to come, as open-platform PaaS vendors make their play against the proprietary platforms that currently dominate the fast-growing PaaS space.
