A recent report from Gartner details a spike the firm observed in the number of search queries for the term “PaaS” from users of its website. Independent researcher Louis Columbus summarizes the report on his blog. He notes that at Gartner, search terms are considered a leading indicator of future IT spending.
The number of searches for PaaS on Gartner.com spiked from around 250 in December to over 700 in January, and have remained between 650-700 in February and March.
The spike in interest was likely caused by high profile acquisitions of PaaS vendors by Red Hat and Salesforce.com in December. Red Hat acquired Makara (now OpenShift), and Salesforce.com acquired Heroku.
The spike Gartner saw does not match Google’s search trends. Google Trends shows a big spike in April of 2011, with a return to normal in May. Google’s spike seems to correspond with VMware’s announcement of Cloud Foundry.
Previously, Gartner revealed that SaaS is one of its top search terms.
We covered the Forrester Wave on PaSS here.
