Platform as a Service

PaaS gets a boost

The concept of Platform-as-a-Service will change the economics of application development and delivery by drastically reducing development costs while simultaneously providing scalability, high availability and reduced maintenance says Akhtar Pasha

When we started working on this Platform-as-a-Service story more commonly referred to as PaaS, we though that we would not have a strong story to tell. That thought changed quickly when we delved into the topic and found many takers of this technology including Elbee Express, Su-Kam, Janalakshmi Finance, Vantage Broker, Maytas Properties and many more. An interesting point to be noted here is that these companies are not the Tatas or Ambanis of the world, these relatively smaller companies are starting to make an impact.

PaaS is nothing but a hosted application stack that can be used to build and deploy a Web application with no servers to configure or administer and can be accessed using a browser. The PaaS model makes all of the facilities required to support the end-to-end life cycle of building and delivering Web applications and services entirely available from the Internet—with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers, or end-users. PaaS may also include workflow for application design, development, testing, deployment, and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, Web service integration, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation, and developer community facilitation.

What is even more entertaining is the fact that PaaS is entering into an adoption phase when the entire economy is in the recession mode. IT maintenance and licensing costs are bleeding and putting pressure on a company’s finances. CIOs and CFOs are on a hunt to look at options to keep their IT costs low but at the same time use innovative technology solutions that can support business initiatives.

There are many models that have emerged in the past to take the functions of enterprise IT and package them as a service such as managed service provider wherein a service provider would install, operate and maintain hardware, software in a hosted environment on its premises. Application Service Provider (ASP) is the other model, wherein an enterprise might instead draw on multiple vendors, each supporting a single application. ASP might offer customers a choice between licensing the application code for installation and use on the customer’s premises or subscribing to an application stack maintained by provider at the latter’s own site. PaaS is the third model that has emerged to deliver on-demand software as a service.

“In the traditional model, building and running on-premise applications have always been complex, expensive, and risky. Each application required hardware, an operating system, a database, middleware, Web servers, and other software,” said Doug Farber, Vice President-Operations, Asia Pacific, Salesforce.com. Once the stack was assembled, a team of developers had to navigate complex programming models like J2EE and .NET. He continued, “A team of network, database, and system management experts was needed to keep everything up and running pushing the cost and time to develop and market significantly higher.” Inevitably, a business requirement would require a change to the application, which would then kick off a lengthy development, test, and redeployment cycle—reinventing the wheel.

Farber explained the benefits of PaaS. “It helps more developers to get ideas into real applications sooner and cheaper without the risk associated with building applications using the traditional model. That leads to greater choice and higher-quality applications for small and mid-sized companies.” He cited Elbee Express as example. Farber informed that he saw Elbee Express’ CIO, Shirish Gariba at a conference saying that he has developed an application for delivering and tracking consignments by incorporating mobile communications technology in the delivery model and that there was no significant cost associated with it and it did not require expensive devices to access the server. The delivery boys’ were using mobile phones with a browser and Gariba’s team developed it from scratch using PaaS.

CIOs and the CEOs want to cut IT costs. PaaS offers exactly what the companies are looking to do now due to the following reasons:

• No IT infrastructure investments
• No software to install
• No technical development skills
• On-demand business applications

PaaS addresses the concerns of the companies by cutting costs, giving them a pay-as-you-use model, instead of them having to invest heavily on IT infrastructure, which they may not even utilize fully. It also offers the flexibility to maintain business application state and all details in XML format, creating zero dependency on software code to update to newer versions or to move to a new platform unlike traditional software. Customers can build business and productivity applications, which help meet their unique business needs and demands without programming within days and weeks.

An idea can change things: PaaS deployment

About seven million SMBs generally do not consume any IT today and are open to ‘PaaS’ or Cloud Computing to enable them to compete with giants in their verticals. According to Springboard Research, the Indian SaaS market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 77% from 2006 to 2010, to reach $165 million by 2010. Analysts peg India as the fastest-growing SaaS market in the Asia Pacific. Frost & Sullivan estimates that the market will grow at a CAGR of approximately 71% to reach $267 million by 2011. Results from a survey of Indian SMBs revealed that Indian SMBs have the highest level of awareness of SaaS in Asia. The problems SMBs face in terms of IT technologies are not new. The enterprise has traditionally been the initial target of new technologies.

Farber explained that the Force.com platform would completely change the role of IT departments. The break-fix-patch-upgrade components of IT will become irrelevant, because with the cloud everyone runs on one shared infrastructure and one version. “It also creates a new role for IT departments, one of innovation. When you can develop, deploy, and run apps in the cloud, without having to worry about buying and maintaining hardware and software, you can focus on adding value to the business,” added Farber.

He sees Indian developers taking a lot of interest cloud computing. “It is enabling a new class of entrepreneurs since one does not need to build offices, distribution centers, data centers or really infrastructure of any kind—everything is managed in the cloud,” he added. It leverages the Internet, and building on Internet-based platforms like Force.com, these new entrepreneurs need relatively little capital to grow and can tap into the vast IT expertise that exists in India. The Web also offers great marketplaces like the AppExchange that provide global distribution. We are entering a new era of democratization for developers around the world and a huge shift in power in the software industry, which symbolizes an explosion in choice and innovation.

Some entrepreneurial developers have even created on-demand applications in their spare time that now sell to a global audience. The chemistry in India is as good as it gets, combining the legendary energy and entrepreneurship of developers with the power of the Force.com platform said Farber. The momentum for innovative on-demand applications is enormous.

One thing that we are excited about said Farber and I think that the Indian market in particular is ready to embrace, is Force.com. “PaaS represents a significant opportunity for India—there is a highly educated, highly technical workforce and great bandwidth capabilities—the combination of these two things along with the power of PaaS creates an immense opportunity for local ISVs and independent developers. The only requirements for developers are an Internet connection and a great idea,” said Farber. The Indian market is best poised to leverage the opportunity to build and deliver applications in the cloud. Just as Amazon.com, eBay, Google, iTunes, and YouTube made it possible to access new capabilities and new markets through a Web browser, PaaS offers a faster, more cost-effective model for application development and delivery.

Salesforce.com has TCS, Enzigma and Compro Technologies as its ISV partners that are working on Salesforce’s Apex code to develop customized applications.

Can PaaS lead to vendor lock-in?

While PaaS is an innovative way of developing and deploying applications online, the downsides are vendor lock-in, reduced flexibility and data issues. In general, PaaS models are well suited for an application that does not deal with sensitive or important data. Farber opined out that look at world’s largest software, SAP and Oracle they are proprietary, mainframes are proprietary. Nevertheless, having a subscription-based model for applications developed using PaaS does not allow vendor lock-in. “For example, our existing customers who are using this model can walk away anytime to another platform if they are unsatisfied and we will give them all the data back. It’s only a matter of confidence that is required for this technology to get going and that will happen over a period of time as customers start deploying pilot projects,” he said. He citied outsourcing payroll that earlier considered very sensitive to any organization but over a period, it showed its value and today it is being accessed over the cloud. The same is expected to happen in the case of PaaS.

Farber said, “One thing we always keep in mind—people always overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. We are at the beginning of a huge technology shift, and only time will tell.”

Salesforce, Google, Amazon, Bungee Labs, Coghead, Longjump and many more vendors are working on PaaS to deliver applications. Force.com from Salesforce is arguably the most successful and popular platform providing components such as database, integration, storage, logic etc) as a service. Google’s App Engine is used for creating lightweight consumer application while Amazon’s Web services are centered on storage to drive applications. Zoho is another player in this area.

Incidentally all the three vendors—Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon form a strategic alliance. A company like Amazon brings cloud computing power, storage capacity and even payment-and-billing technologies. Salesforce’s alliance with Facebook—the deal opens the social networking platform and social graph to incorporate Salesforce apps into it; using Force.com to make it look like any other Facebook page. The example is a recruiting tool for Facebook. This particular tool allows employees to post job listings on their Facebook pages, where the job requirements are matched to the skills and experience of the employee’s Facebook friends. With a single click, the employee can tell a Facebook friend about a cool new job and tell the employer about a potential new employee.

As we pointed out in the beginning, PaaS will set the pace for how applications are developed and delivered in the cloud without substantial cost and risks. Given the weak economic market conditions where everybody is facing liquidity crisis, every CIO and CFO is under scrutiny to reduce IT costs. PaaS delivers not only more customized software at faster speeds, but also provides a better price.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com