A Look at Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application PaaS

Gartner has released the first edition of their famous “Magic Quadrant” for Enterprise High Productivity Application Platform as a Service (HPAPaaS). While there’s no 2016 version to compare it to, we’ll be keeping an eye on the market in the coming years to see where vendors are placed in any future Magic Quadrants.

In the 2017 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High Productivity Application PaaS, Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of what it considers leading vendors in the enterprise PaaS market and provides readers with a graph (the ‘Magic Quadrant’) plotting the vendors based on their ability to execute, and completeness of vision. The graph is divided into four quadrants: niche players, challengers, visionaries, and leaders. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications. The vendors included in this Magic Quadrant include Salesforce, Mendix, OutSystems, ServiceNow, Caspio, Appian, QuickBase, Betty Blocks, TrackVia, Fujitsu, Zoho, kintone, and Oracle.

According to Gartner, Leaders are able to demonstrate an ability to fulfill a broad variety of customer requirements through the breadth of its access layer product family. The vendors have the ability to shape the market and provide complete and differentiating access layer applications. And “challengers” are defined by Gartner as vendors who who have demonstrated sustained execution in the marketplace, and will have clear and long-term viability in the market, but may not have a complete access layer product portfolio for either products or network applications. These challengers have yet to develop the ability to shape the market with differentiating functionality. As this in the first hpaPaaS Magic Quadrant, no vendors have been either dropped or added.

Gartner defines PaaS as an “application infrastructure functionality enriched with cloud characteristics and offered as a service” with “high productivity” supporting “declarative, and model driven design and one-step deployment.” This year’s Magic Quadrant takes a look at some of the biggest trends in the space. According to the report, the market is evolving at an impressive speed, incorporating the evolutions of the BPM PaaS market and the Rapid App Development market. The trend is expected to continue for the next few years while aPaaS incorporates more mobile technologies, decisions, and processes.

Furthermore, Gartner has noted that the divide between SaaS and hpaPaaS has continued to narrow while providers develop their ecosystems to include templates and pre-built applications. Gartner also mentions that modern IT initiatives are strongly aligned with hpaPaaS adoption. The Bimodal IT approach requires requires experimentation at a minimal cost, aligning with the benefits of high productivity PaaS offerings including hpaPaaS.

In the leader category we have three familiar vendors, OutSystems, Mendix, and Salesforce. Gartner mentions that Salesforce’s impressive name recognition, presence, revenue, and system integration are the primary reasons why the vendor lands on so many hpaPaaS shortlists.  The vendor’s recent agreement to port the platform to Amazon Web Services may also further accelerate adoption by opening new capabilities. The niche category is very crowded, especially towards the quadrant’s origin. This cluster includes names such as Betty Blocks, Appian, and QuickBase. Kintone and Zoho are the only exceptions, holding a highly niche spot in the bottom left portion of the quadrant. The Challenger and Visionary Quadrants are scarcely populated with only ServiceFlow, and Kony in the Challengers quadrant and Oracle by itself in the Visionary quadrant.

If you’d like to read more about this year’s iteration of the Wired and Wireless LAN Access Structure, head over to Gartner, to take a look at the full report!