Contributed article by Bennett Indart, Vice President of Cloud Services at NTT DATA, Inc.

The Growth of PaaS and Cloud Integration

2013 was the year of the cloud. Organizations achieved great success by being able to cut IT costs and improve efficiency. 2014 looks to be even bigger in cloud as the market continues to grow. As always, there are areas of growth and some challenges to be aware of in the New Year.

The Promise of PaaS

In 2013, everything started being delivered ‘as a service' and the Software as a Service (SaaS) market became even more mainstream, lead mostly by Salesforce.com. As we head into 2014, this market is not slowing down and will continue to be more prevalent. Specifically, we are seeing a lot more traction in the area of Platform as a Service (PaaS). The reason it has become so popular is the agility it brings by having a platform that lowers IT costs, speeds up development and provides organizations with the ability to create applications quickly. As a testament to its growth, a recent IDC report predicts that the global market for PaaS will grow from $3.8 billion last year to more than $14 billion in 2017. One of the reasons for its rapid growth is the ability to perform functional and load testing, as well as to deploy software.

DevOps and Industry-specific Applications

The growth of PaaS is also fueled by the link between DevOps and the cloud. DevOps is a software development practice that involves collaboration between operations teams and developers to increase agility and deliver applications to market more quickly. In fact, a recent RightScale survey found that 54 percent of respondents have adopted DevOps and they also found that higher levels of cloud maturity in an organization correlate with adoption of DevOps. The result is there are more web-based applications and cloud driven development. Organizations are seeing a lot more production use of the cloud with some of these industry-based applications or verticalized applications.

One of the main uses of verticalized applications we see is in the public sector space. Over the past year, the public sector has increased its use of traditional SaaS applications and is not only moving to a private virtualized data center, but starting to select off the menu of SaaS providers. So as you can imagine, there's an entire eco-system of other software packages and solutions that are growing out of that.

Challenges of Cloud Integration

The rapid growth of cloud adoption does not come without its challenges. A main concern in 2014 is how to integrate all applications in the cloud. Cloud integration should be one of the major initiatives of CIOs in 2014. As many enterprises move beyond early cloud implementations, they are discovering that enabling business processes in the cloud is complex, requiring a comprehensive integration strategy.

This is primarily because business processes are becoming increasingly interwoven among on-premises and multiple cloud models and environments while social media, mobility, and Big Data are increasing the number of required integration points. According to Gartner, by 2016, 50 percent of new integration projects will involve on-premises applications, e-commerce trading partners and cloud services.

Organizations need to learn how to put some of their business in the cloud but also make sure they can integrate the data they have left. Since the cloud is a multi-tenant environment with certain operating aspects, organizations have trouble moving their legacy applications to the cloud. To combat these challenges, in 2014 organizations should start thinking about their integration strategy as a first step and not an afterthought. By taking a business process-driven approach, focusing on enabling the flow of information and architecting a solution that best supports your business goals, organizations will be ready to reap all the benefits of the cloud in 2014.

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About the Author

Bennett Indart is the vice president of cloud services at NTT DATA, Inc. where he is responsible for the overall management and growth of NTT DATA's cloud applications services business in the Americas region. Previously, he was the vice president of the infrastructure practice at Keane and vice president of marketing and business development at Symphony-Metreo. Prior to that, he held senior positions at Informatica, Influence Software and Andersen Consulting. Bennett holds a BA in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA in Marketing and Entrepreneurship from the University of Colorado Boulder - Leeds School of Business.