IDC's Worldwide Cloud Platform as a Service Taxonomy, 2026

This IDC study provides a detailed description of IDC's cloud platform as a service market. IDC defines the cloud PaaS market as 100% of the revenue of IT capability in the application development and deployment (AD&D) primary software market when it is composed and delivered as a cloud service.PaaS is segmented into seven secondary markets including application platforms, data management, artificial intelligence core, application development, and integration and orchestration.These secondary markets are combinations of existing AD&D functional software markets that reflect the most prevalent combinations of integrated functionality based on customer use cases and the most typical supplier offerings, in addition to other market factors such as the primary problem being solved by the service."The cloud platform as a service taxonomy describes the fast-growing PaaS, which grew by greater than 32% to reach $162 billion in revenue in 2024," said Adam Reeves, research director, Platform as a Service for Developers of Modern and Edge Applications at IDC. "The taxonomy defines the seven secondary markets that drive market growth, including artificial intelligence, application development, and data management."