[reprinted from tiger olfactory network] the cloud computing industry has always paid high attention to IAAs and SaaS.

In contrast, the discussion about PAAS is rather cold. The idea of writing a "trilogy" around PAAS has a long history. At the beginning of the year, we completed two consecutive articles (PAAS is a good comrade, but SaaS is not reliable in engaging in PAAS, and what does PAAS need to brush its sense of existence through cracks to survive?). The third chapter is about the relationship between PAAS and cloud computing pattern.

1、 Can IAAs oligarchs dominate represent the overall situation of cloud computing?

According to a recent report released by Morgan Stanley, "in 2016, China's public cloud market share was about $2 billion, of which Alibaba cloud accounted for about 50% of the market share.". Looking at the global market, quarterly data from synergy research group, a market research company, shows that Amazon AWS ate 45% of the global IAAs open market share, higher than the combined share of Microsoft, Google and IBM.

From a global perspective, IAAs dominates 66.7% of the global cloud computing market. Obviously, this is an IAAs dominated Jianghu. At the same time, Amazon AWS, which has the most comprehensive storage products in history, stores 1.6 times more data than the total of seven object storage services including Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba cloud, Oracle, etc. In China's IAAs market, Alibaba cloud dominates half of the country, and it is also the largest.

Even if we don't want to see the already defined market structure of IAAs, from a digital perspective, we have to admit that the oligopoly structure of IAAs has been formed and its advantages are large enough. This means that even though IAAs players other than AWS and Alibaba cloud are willing to change the status quo, it is as difficult as shaking the mountain.

IAAs is an oligarch, so can we think that the overall situation of cloud computing has been determined? The answer is, No.

Conceptually, cloud computing can be simply summarized as a pay as you use model, and IAAs is just one of the service forms of cloud computing. We can say that IAAs is an important part of cloud computing, but we can't directly equate cloud computing and IAAs, which is also a misunderstanding that many articles often enter when discussing cloud computing.

2、 Why is PAAS a "variable" in China's cloud computing market?

Morgan Stanley's recent report also pointed out that since 2016, the application of public cloud in China market will accelerate, and has a huge growth space. In addition, the slowdown of China's overall economy will also stimulate the acceleration of cloud computing applications, because public cloud can save more costs for governments and enterprises. Compared with the US $70 billion public cloud market in 2016, the future growth rate and expected scale of the Chinese market are exciting.

There is no doubt that China's cloud computing market has great potential. But from the perspective of IAAs, the bigger the cake is, the bigger the cake will not break the market pattern that IAAs has already formed. On the contrary, Alibaba cloud's leading advantage in IAAs market is likely to further expand with the growth of the overall scale of China's public cloud market. Such marginal effect has a precedent in overseas markets. In the development process of global cloud computing, service providers, including Microsoft, IBM and other giants, devote themselves to the "pursuit" of IAAs, but the gap between them and AWS is always widening.

With the expansion of China's public cloud market, the biggest beneficiary is SaaS layer. This is a good understanding. As more and more Chinese enterprises begin to choose cloud applications, the "customer pool" of SaaS providers will become larger and larger. The benign supply-demand relationship will finally give SaaS products the potential to raise prices, and the problem that has always plagued the "profitability" of SaaS players will be effectively solved.

Although the SaaS layer has ushered in good news, for the whole cloud computing market, SaaS companies providing software services are still too small to have the ability to control the overall pattern. Moreover, when the enterprise level services develop to the current stage, it is difficult for the Chinese market to grow another salesforce.

The author believes that the "variables" that will change the pattern of China's cloud computing market in the future are likely to appear in the PAAS layer, which has been ignored for three reasons.

First of all, PAAS enters the market as a platform, providing an integrated platform (ipaas) and an application deployment and operation platform (apaas) for SaaS manufacturers. From the perspective of deployment, PAAS can be subdivided into database services, application development, application infrastructure, middleware services, etc. As a platform, PAAS has much more imagination space than SaaS, and has the possibility to change the cloud computing market pattern.

Secondly, PAAS has enough room for growth. Cloud computing is divided into IAAs PAAS SaaS three layers from the bottom up, and PAAS is naturally sandwiched between IAAs and SaaS. Although IAAs service providers have the inherent advantages of being PAAS, do they really want to be PAAS? According to the current development trend, no, IAAs giants are busy playing with AI. SaaS can't reach, IAAs can't care, which gives PAAS a gap for growth.

Third, and most critical, is the strong market demand for PAAS. Looking at the whole cloud computing field, IAAs is the leader, SaaS is thriving, but PAAS market is not doing it. The main reason is that the development level of SaaS is relatively low before, and SaaS does not just need PAAS. However, with the outbreak and maturity of enterprise application market, SaaS applications have higher and higher requirements for segmentation, cross layer, efficiency, collaboration and connectivity, and the importance of PAAS has increased dramatically. The rapid growth of PAAS volume and evolution will inevitably follow, which is foreseeable.

3、 From enterprise informatization to industry informatization, will PAAS "explode"?