This IDC study provides 2008–2010 revenue share data for the worldwide public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market. This is a competitive market that reports vendor revenue for application development and deployment products that are delivered as services via a public cloud. This market has been renamed from last year's worldwide application development and deployment-as-a-service market. Worldwide public PaaS revenue increased from $1.6 billion in 2009 to $2.2 billion in 2010, reflecting 36.3% growth.

What is also now very clear from the nature of the announcements made by the leading platform vendors is that delivering a comprehensive array of public platform products requires a level of delivery and management capabilities involving automated provisioning, dynamic scalability, and multitenancy. "Cloud management capabilities are the foundation of any platform-as-a-service offering," said Stephen D. Hendrick, group vice president for Application Development and Deployment research. "The challenge in delivering public cloud services is bounded by two opposing forces: the need for security and the desire to leverage resources efficiently in order to deliver the best possible economics."