SAP declined to explain why it bought Coghead, saying only that it would use Coghead technology internally in an unspecified way.

SAP has not been a player in cloud computing, Rymer noted. SAP hired IBM to host its on-demand offerings and, although SAP had SaaS intentions when it brought its Business ByDesign on-demand business software offering to market, "the company has since backed away from that product, apparently for performance reasons," said Rymer.

Rymer also cautioned potential PaaS users not to make too much of the Coghead failure: "Coghead was a startup, and they didn't make it." More established companies are always a safer bet, but if a startup offers interesting features, customers need to have a contingency plan in case the company goes out of business, he said. But "you might not want to build an app that's absolutely mission-critical to your company on that vendor," he added. Rymer contrasted Coghead's precarious state as a startup to that of Amazon.com, the most established PaaS provider. "EC2 is being carried along by the larger Amazon. Besides, it's grown very rapidly as far as we can tell," he said.