Computerworld — When Forrester's Michael Facemire set out to write a report on back-end as a service, published in August 2012, he interviewed 13 companies. "Since then I've found out about nearly 40 companies that call themselves BaaS," he says.

BaaS vendors offer services aimed at making it quick, easy and inexpensive for developers to add common functions such as messaging to their mobile apps, freeing them up to focus on the functions that are important to the business. Companies will need to choose their provider carefully, because consolidation is certain, says Facemire.

[This story accompanies a more in-depth look at BaaS and how it works, "Speed up mobile app dev with back-end as a service."]