Unlike what the development world experienced with emergence of two leading platform vendors, and up until recently a third with the widespread adoption of open source, cloud-based platforms, or PaaS—platform as a service, has yet to be dominated by a single vendor. I characterize the situation as a land grab, while some at at Software 2008 this week, namely McKinsey called it an emerging war in the enterprise.

Because the landscape is still taking shape and there are no clear boundaries on what services a PaaS should be expected offer, it's going to take the biggest and most prominent stake to declare them. There are several well-known PaaS vendors such as those from Salesforce, Amazon, Coghead, Bungee Labs, Webex and OpSource, yet they all differ quite significantly from one another.  

I like the framework McKinsey employs in the report released today. To sum it up, there are three market segments that PaaS vendors cater to: delivery, developer, and ISV.

With fears of captive lock-in, customers will need to see innovation and efficiency at any of these levels, and integration to existing on-premise data sources will be a key differentiator.

 McKinsey report on the emerging PaaS war