Business and IT Glossary > Collaboration Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Collaboration Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Collaboration Platforms as a Service are collaboration capabilities that become services in the form of APIs, or collaboration-enabled business applications. These applications perform specific tasks and can be extended with additional functionality.

PaaS has merged with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in the cloud, democratizing the building and deployment of applications. Cloud, mobile, and the growing API economy are taking communication and collaboration out of proprietary stacks and embedding them into business applications, processes, and services in which people do their work.

This revolution has caused the ongoing emergence of business-led API architectures with measurable business outcomes as the driving requirement. Many new collaboration PaaS players are emerging as collaboration-enabled business applications. Service providers are partnering with these vendors to build developer ecosystems around their services. Traditional collaboration providers are also emerging with their own PaaS offerings.