Gartner Names 3 ‘Cool Vendors’ for Specialized PaaS

The Information technology research and advisory firm Gartner has released the latest iterations of its yearly Cool Vendors in Specialized PaaS (Platform as a Service) report. Specialized PaaS, according to Gartner, is a PaaS offering for “specific use cases.”

The five-page report, priced at $495 USD, names three ‘cool vendors’— those whose “offerings and business models point to new directions in the market,” according to Gartner— to help CIOs and IT decision makers consider new vendors and specialized PaaS technologies.

In the report, Gartner makes several recommendations for enterprise CIOs who are developing a PaaS strategy.

CIOs, Gartner recommends, should expand their strategy, and look further than standard application platform as a service (aPaaS) and integration platform as a service (iPaaS) offerings. Specialized PaaS offerings have “compelling point solutions”, and should be treated the same as any other specialized middleware.

Additionally, Gartner has echoed a common call-to-arms amongst Gartner analysts: CIOs must take a cloud-first approach to projects, and broaden the scope of use for PaaS solutions. By considering PaaS solutions for projects with all types of application requirements— not just “cloud-centric scenarios”— CIOs can use private and hybrid PaaS solutions to spread PaaS benefits to on-premise applications.

The following three vendors were named ‘cool vendors’ in the 2015 report:

PubNub, a provider of APIs for real-time application development. PubHub started life as a provider of APIs that allowed publishers and developers to integrate messaging and social services on apps and websites and now offers PubNub Data Stream Network, a PaaS solutions that allows rapid development of real-time apps and communication for web, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) apps.

Pusher, cloud service and provider of a hosted API for adding real-time bi-directional communication functionality to web and mobile apps, or any internet connected device. For example, a news website can use Pusher’s API to add live delivery of curated content through social channels to create a real-time news feed.

Restlet, providers of the Restlet Framework, an open-source API development framework. Restlet framework is a combination of APISpark, Restlet’s specialized PaaS offering for building data-oriented Web APIs, and Restlet Studio, a free visual API design tool.

Gartner does not endorse any specific vendor and disclaims that Gartner’s ‘Cool Vendors’ “will not be appropriate for every organization.”