More than half of all applications developed on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will be Internet of Things (IoT) centric by 2020, according to research house Gartner Inc.

In a new report titled “Predicts 2016: PaaS Innovation Continues Unabated”, Gartner reveals how the rise in IoT adoption will drive much greater use of PaaS as the favorite way to implement what it calls “IoT-centric business applications”, or those that revolve around sensory data and event-driven architecture.

“New IoT-centric business applications will drive a transformation in application design practices that focus on real-time contextually rich decisions, event-analysis, lightweight workflow, and broad access to Web-scale data,” wrote Benoit Lheureux, research vice president at Gartner.

The majority of new IoT-centric solutions will be implemented on “multifunctional, comprehensive PaaS” platforms, which Gartner describes a hybrid, architecturally coherent integration of application platform as a service (aPaaS), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), IoT device management, orchestration and business process management services as a platform (bpmPaaS), database PaaS (dbPaaS) and analytics services.

Gartner says that IT leaders are increasingly investing in cloud platforms in order to enhance new IT initiatives. However, Gartner says that many self-managed private PaaS initiatives won’t be able to meet IT’s expectations of cloud characteristics in the next three years.

As such, Gartner believes the tension between those in favor of private PaaS and those who advocate full public cloud platforms will intensify as the former choice disappoints. In the end, managed private or public PaaS platforms will emerge as the favorite choices.

“Success with a private cloud (including PaaS) requires a recognition of the essential cultural and organizational changes to IT organizations, as well as technology changes,” said Yefim V Natis, vice president and Gartner Fellow, in a statement accompanying the report. “Lacking this understanding leads many organizations to stop their PaaS investment at the point of technology deployment — leading to disappointing results down the road.”

By 2019 the leading aPaaS vendors will be expected to be able to deliver both high-productivity and high-control PaaS options as a mandatory capability.

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