This IDC study provides 2008–2010 revenue share data for the worldwide public cloud application platform market. This is a competitive market that reports revenue for vendor products that either in an integrated or a suite fashion meet IDC's definition for a cloud application platform. This market has been renamed from last year's worldwide platform-as-a-service market.

In this second year of coverage of cloud application platforms, we were surprised to see growth that exceeded expectations and close to $500 million in revenue. The power base in cloud application platforms continues to reside with cloud-centric vendors (salesforce.com and Amazon), but we are starting to see a sea change as a result of the general availability of Azure in February 2010 and the announcements from Oracle, IBM, TIBCO, Red Hat, VMware, and Progress during 2011.

The appeal of the cloud application platform market is strong and accounts for the increase in revenue from $223.1 million in 2009 to $490.7 million in 2010 and reflects a 119.9% annual growth rate. "While 2010 enabled the existing leaders to fortify their power base without contention, 2011 will be the last year that this is the case," said Stephen D. Hendrick, group vice president for Application Development and Deployment research. "All of the announcements that occurred in 2011 will lead to compelling new products from powerhouse middleware vendors like IBM, Oracle, TIBCO, Red Hat, VMware, and Progress in 2012."