Led by John Rymer, Forrester’s research team including Randy Heffner, Jeffrey S. Hammond, James Staten, and Wallis Yu, provided an extensive report entitled “Platform-As-A-Service Is Here: How To Sift Through The Options” on several PaaS vendors, including LongJump. The report discusses the rewards and risks of PaaS for application development and includes products up and down the PaaS stack, and is one of the most extensive reports on the topic.

The basic reward of PaaS is that it allows IT groups to defray capital costs and some operations costs (configuration, management, reliability, and scalability) to a vendor. PaaS shares these potential advantages with other forms of “cloud computing.” If the economics work out, application development groups should be able to use these cost savings to improve their responsiveness to the business’ needs for new and changed applications.

The Forrester report also deep dives into how enterprises can start planning for PaaS-based initiatives with a pragmatic approach to their long tail IT applications, including on-premise deployment as offered by LongJump’s new platform configuration.

Forrester recommended that application development managers begin to experiment with PaaS to determine its potential future value. Forrester is convinced that today’s PaaS market contains at least the seeds of the next generation of application platforms, if not one or more of the companies that will drive the category. We recommended considering how PaaS can help deal with current business needs and listed important factors to consider when working to create a prudent initial approach to PaaS.

The complete report is available on Forrester’s website here. If you subscribe to their research, you can get the report for free.