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The platform-as-a-service cloud: Developers are in charge

Current PaaS offerings focus mainly on individual developers, but analysts expect enterprise-class offerings to emerge

By Paul Krill, InfoWorld, 06/07/11

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud computing, in which full-fledged application development and deployment capabilities are provided rather than just raw iron and compute cycles such as in Amazon Web Services, is set to gather steam as a deployment option for programmers. But the market is still in start mode, and developers are calling the shots.

Currently, PaaS is a $2.8 billion market, but "it will become over the next 10 years a $10 billion market," says Forrester Research analyst Stefan Ried, who recently published a report on PaaS. Microsoft's Windows Azure and Salesforce.com's Force.com are currently the leading platforms for coders in the fledgling PaaS marketplace, according to Forrester. But the list of contenders is long, ranging from Google App Engine to services from companies such as Caspio, EngineYard, LongJump, OrangeScape, Tibco, and WaveMakers, Ried says. In defining PaaS, Forrester says it features a complete application platform for multitenant cloud environments, including development tools, runtime and administration, and management tools and services.

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User hails PaaS, but cloud exec not seeing much adoption
WebFilings, a three-year-old company that offers Web-based assistance in filling U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reports, has anchored its business to Google App Engine. "We looked at Google and its strong reputation for security and said, 'Well, instead of us having to manage and maintain all of that platform, we'll count on Google to do that,' and that just removes a layer of complexity and enables us to focus on innovation for our market," says Dan Murray, WebFilings managing director.

But Treb Ryan, CEO at cloud computing services vendor OpSource, has seen underwhelming adoption of PaaS so far: "It's been slow -- much to our surprise, actually." Although OpSource expected development to be the primary driver for PaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has seen "magnitudes more" adoption, he says. Issues holding back PaaS have included proprietary offerings at the outset and having to rewrite applications. IaaS "is much easier to adopt," Ryan notes, though he expects PaaS platforms to improve and ultimately succeed.

Forrester's report emphasizes that PaaS remains "an immature market with lots of potential risks for buyers," says analyst Ried. But he also believes IaaS ultimately offers less value: "You just get the virtualized hardware." Developers using IaaS offerings such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) must deal with virtual machines, storage blocks, execution threads, and network connections.

WebFilings does maintain 10 percent of its operation on the Amazon EC2 IaaS platform for some CPU-intensive processing, but if WebFilings had been launched formed today, Murray says Amazon EC2 probably would not be needed at all, thanks to App Engine's subsequent improvements.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.