OREANDA-NEWS. IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that developers and IT managers across the U.S. cited IBM Bluemix as one of the fastest growing and most widely adopted platforms as a service (PaaS) according to a new survey from the analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

According to ESG’s analysis of the survey results, Bluemix adoption is growing at a rate 5 times faster on average than the other leading vendors in the PaaS market. The survey results encompass hundreds of North American developers and IT managers who ranked IBM Bluemix ahead of the competition in areas including internal application development, PaaS satisfaction, PaaS benefits and future IT needs. IBM also won high praise for Bluemix being the world’s largest Cloud Foundry deployment, with more than 150 APIs and services in 179 countries.

Other survey findings include:

  • Bluemix is growing more than 5X faster than the leading PaaS vendors based on average growth since general availability.

  • Bluemix was one of the fastest growing platforms across developers and IT managers who are either using Bluemix or evaluating what PaaS to use.

  • Bluemix developers are more focused on custom application development than any other PaaS vendor.

  • Benefits where Bluemix maintained a leadership positon over other PaaS vendors included access to a wide range of PaaS capabilities and the ability to improve the quality of their applications.

  • Areas where Bluemix drove levels of satisfaction to levels higher than any other PaaS vendor included mobile application development capabilities, security features and cost effectiveness.

  • Over the next two years, Bluemix users indicated that the platform would remain critical to their application development needs versus using other tools from competitive vendors.

The survey results reinforce IBM’s success and traction in hybrid cloud. IBM’s total cloud revenue --- including public, private and hybrid engagements --- was $11.6 billion over the previous 12 months that ended in June 2016. IBM’s cloud delivered as a service business had an annual run rate of $6.7 billion in Q2, up 50 percent year to year, a subset of the total, which includes PaaS.

“The platform-as-a-service market is experiencing high growth and currently favors well established application development and deployment vendors who provide both PaaS and IaaS capabilities,” said Stephen D. Hendrick, principal analyst for application development research at ESG.