This IDC study, which is a translation of the Japanese document IDC #J12420102, analyzes the competitiveness of vendors in the Japan cloud application platform market ― covering platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) application platform software market — based on the latest survey data, reports, information sources, and IDC's software market taxonomy for 2012.

Currently, vendors are not competing intensively to differentiate themselves in the PaaS market. The number of vendors in the market is small and vendors are positioned in respective areas of application development. Compared with IaaS and software as a service (SaaS), the user appetite for PaaS is still low as cases of successful deployment have just begun to emerge in social applications and time-limited campaign sites. "In order to successfully deploy the PaaS business, vendors will have to improve their services and solutions to cater to the needs for application collaboration among user companies. Another important factor for success is whether vendors can retain the existing customers in the middleware and open source software (OSS) business into the PaaS business," says Yuko Tominaga, senior market analyst, Software and Security, IDC Japan.