Interest in PaaS rising among businesses

The cloud has gradually become a sure bet as a catalyst for the next wave of enterprise IT innovations. You would have been forgiven for hesitating to add hosted architecture three years ago, still wondering whether the market would indeed move in that direction. However, the years since have seen uses such as rapid application development through Platform-as-a-Service emerge, showing just how powerful the right cloud computing infrastructure can be.

Now, PaaS is beginning to look like the default development approach, and staying with on-premise technology may represent a serious mistake. No matter the industry, you likely can't afford to make such a misstep.

Becoming serious about PaaS
While the decision about which elements of the cloud to implement is rarely clear-cut, the needle seems to be swinging back to full PaaS implementation. According to IT World's Nancy Gohring, this is at least partly due to the introduction of new deployment possibilities. Experts in the market, including Progress' own Karen Tegan Padir, told her that the new wave of products has rekindled enthusiasm for this type of technology.

Choices are always attractive to IT buyers. Being forced to implement PaaS solutions on a public cloud model may have scared away some types of companies, Gohring suggested. Now that the platforms can run in various locations, that restriction has been removed and leaders who might have dismissed the idea before could be coming around to PaaS.

Gohring predicted a busy 2014, explaining that IT departments will choose a few favorite products and base their operations on those. The end result could be a robust PaaS market and improved operations for companies that make the switch.

Next steps
The IT world is not the same place it was a decade ago. As IDC Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst Frank Gens outlined, the current status quo is based on basic tenets called the "third platform." This means business computing is now concerned with the cloud, mobility, data use and social connections. Gens explained that PaaS is becoming a more desirable option than Infrastructure-as-a-Service for companies trying to cope with the current landscape, and that service providers with outdated ideals will find themselves scrambling to keep up with the changes.

Survival in an environment that is always changing means sticking with the latest and best options. For businesses that want to develop applications, that could mean PaaS-enabled practices. With widespread market interest turning toward cloud-based development, refusing to evolve now could mean being left behind by more adaptable competitors.

Continue reading...