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PaaS – Your 2012 Cloud Secret Weapon

Contributed Article by Sinclair Schuller, CEO, Apprenda

In 2012, as cloud utilization continues to skyrocket, we’ll see enterprises deploying private Platform as a Service (PaaS), which will bring new types of agility and economics to the IT department and corporations.

Real production PaaS deployments are becoming a reality and IT is starting to understand that utilizing the cloud, be it in-house on a private cloud or outsourced to a public cloud, not only gives IT a new type of agility and economics that brings real value to the enterprise, but also paves the way for the development of innovative business applications.

As the cloud has evolved, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) developed as a way for companies of all sizes to have access to the raw power by way of off-site server, storage and networking hardware needed to run an enterprise. While this was a step forward, it didn’t do anything to improve the model for how applications were written for this new environment. This gap led to PaaS, which emerged as a computing platform that acts as a host to “guest” applications that abstracts away most unnecessary details of the underlying infrastructure. While this reduces the amount of direct control an application has over its host environment, it provides huge benefits including functional guarantees and systems services, in a near self-service way to developers.

Developers adopting PaaS will quickly realize its self-service nature as they reap its benefits, which include:

· The ability to quickly bring applications to market, which can mean creating application environments in as little as five minutes and deploying applications in seconds

· Standardization of deployment via the elimination of application specific configuration and hardware requirements

· Increase developer productivity through shared services accessible both through configuration and via APIs

· Increased infrastructure utilization improvements (beyond what virtualization already provides)

· Shared application services and utilization of existing infrastructure

· Out of the box cloud application architectures, allowing developers to build cloud apps without caring about the implementation details

 

In 2011, we approached the top of the PaaS hype-o-meter, with a plethora of PaaS promises and a ballooning of entrants into the marketplace. With the coming year, as reality and successful PaaS deployments come to be, we’ll see a more technical definition of PaaS with trajectories that define new runtime models for PaaS-based applications. In tandem, we’ll get consolidation in the market as large vendors race to merge and broaden their offerings through in-house development, partners and acquisitions, while smaller vendors will grow via partnerships and specialization. We’ll also see “me too” undifferentiated offerings that don’t provide higher order intrinsic value fall to the wayside.

In 2012, PaaS will be the secret weapon of software engineers and enterprise IT departments as its self-service nature will bring huge value to developers who no longer need to worry about the business or technical challenges of delivering this software as a service via the cloud. Thus, PaaS will change the way applications are created and deploy and more importantly allows more time to be spent on innovative software functions which adds value and productivity to the business. One thing is for certain, 2012 will be an extremely telling year for the PaaS market as real players will emerge and mere wannabes will deteriorate rapidly.

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About the Author

Sinclair Schuller, CEO
Before co-founding Apprenda, Sinclair held positions at Morgan Stanley, Eden Communications, and the State University of New York (SUNY). Sinclair holds a dual Bachelor of Science in Computer Science & Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated Summa CumLaude. Sinclair excels in understanding the economics of SaaS platforms and ecosystems, and is a frequent speaker and panelist at industry events.