Marc Andreesen said recently that 2012 will be remembered as the year of SaaS. What he meant is that SaaS has been around for a while, but it came of age this year, with examples of successes such as the Workday IPO. No one questions the significance of SaaS any more. But the year 2013 will see a shift to PaaS (Platform as a Service) with “most” new activities. There is already a blurring of the lines between IaaS and PaaS, as seen from Amazon’s AWS stack. But programmatic interface in PaaS will dominate as we move forward, catering to the developer community. The incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe (representing “on-premise” software) will have to combat with pure-play cloud players.

I saw a list of cloud pioneers and new cloud tools that are be worth sharing. Among the names (arguably) of cloud pioneers here are the often quoted – Warren Vogel (Amazon CTO), Chris Pinkham (architect of EC2, now head of start-up Nimbula), Randy Bias (CloudScaling, formerly GoGrid), Jonathan Bryce (Rackspace/Openstack), Lew Tucker (CISCO), Rich Wolski (Eucalyptus), Chris Kemp (NASA CTO), Urs Holzle (Google), and Frank Frankovsky (Facebook). You can google their names to see the pioneering work they have done in moving cloud computing forward.

I also saw some new cloud tools as we enter 2013: Evernote (categorize notes, PDF, image, etc.), RightSignature (doc. signing), Expensify (expenses to cloud), Square, Teambox, Backupify, RenewOnDemand. These tools are taking traditional desk-top apps. to the cloud.

Several lists are floating around on winning software startups in 2013: In the Big Data and analytics space – Cloudera, Actian, SiSense, Appranaissance, Appature, and Good Data. In Cloud and Mobile space: many cloud-native startups, CloudPassage, Facebook (new userid and security logon), Xamarian, Sensha, Square, Airbnb, Marian Software and many other HTML5 tools and platform vendors.

One thing for sure – we will see the cloud space getting hotter and hotter in 2013.