Enterprise Demand Driving Vendor Consideration of Internal Clouds

by Steve Bobrowski

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is an exciting new option that has the potential to revolutionize software application development as we know it. PaaS allows application developers to simply build applications in the cloud, without ever having to worry about hardware acquisition and configuration, software installation, configuration, and maintenance, scalability, availability, backups, recovery, etc. You just sign up and start building, deploy with the push of a button, and pay for your usage as you go.

When Platform as a Service (PaaS) vendors first emerged, their elevator pitch usually went something like this.

Our platform and data center provides you, the builder of custom business applications, a more efficient way to build your applications because we do all the heavy lifting of infrastructure and platform management while you concentrate on building great applications.

In the long-term, I happen to agree with this vision that most PaaS vendors initially expressed in their marketing strategies—but in the short-term, I do not think that this will prove to be a successful business strategy for selling to the enterprise. Moving software development and applications (new or existing) entirely from an on-premise data center to the cloud requires a huge shift in culture and thinking that will not happen quickly. My gut feel appears to have played out so far. Although some enterprises dipped their toes into the waters of PaaS for building some custom applications, I haven't seen an overwhelming number of organizations that appear to have dived in head first yet.

So, perhaps the universal business law "the customer is always right" appears to be forcing an evolution of the original PaaS enterprise strategy: on-premise licensing of PaaS technology. Said another way: get your feet wet in your own data center, gain some confidence in PaaS, then scale out or completely outsource your application workload to the cloud. Let's consider some examples of this new micro-trend.

Longjump now licenses their Business Application Platform to essentially run anywhere. This approach provides an option for both the enterprises that handle sensitive, compliance-heavy data (such as the financial services, healthcare, and public sector space) as well as provide ISVs a platform where they can introduce new white labeled SaaS offerings.

"We are not exclusively a cloud vendor and PaaS on-demand is just one vehicle for our customers to derive value from the LongJump platform," LongJump CEO Pankaj Malviya told us. "In fact, our customers take a movable application approach so they can develop on one instance (our PaaS, for example), test on another (a LongJump instance on Amazon EC2), and publish on yet another (LongJump in a private hosting environment). Our real value is helping to streamline application development and delivery and being agnostic to the application infrastructure. With more private cloud options entering the market, there is also less risk for businesses because they still don't have to outlay any hardware to develop and test their applications."

Similarly, Apprenda licenses their SaaSGrid Application Server. Apprenda's CEO Sinclair Schuller told us "We started offering an on-premises version of SaaSGrid for one reason: many customers want the value proposition of a SaaS Application Server. This includes the time-to-market benefits, the multi-tenancy, the trivialized development. However, a large portion of those customers don’t want the cloud delivery model. They want to offer SaaS, but see SaaS on PaaS as impractical with respect to their specific needs. Once a PaaS vendor comes to grips with the fact that the value proposition and the delivery are two different things, it’s only natural to offer the technology across delivery mediums."

We also asked Schuller if SaaSGrid would allow an application to elastically scale-out/in from an on-premise data center to SaaSGrid being hosted in other data centers during times of varying demand. Although there is no commitment to this feature, Schuller did reveal to us "We’ve tested a very early version of this, and we know it works. We plan on moving from a high-level test to introducing cross-network grids in the future."

One can also see the same trend now taking shape in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space as well. Coincidentally, while I was waiting for correspondence to return from the PaaS vendors above, Amazon.com announced Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The idea is to allow any organization to establish a secure, private cloud within Amazon's cloud, a virtual private network (VPN) connection between their data center and their VPC, and then elastically scale using VPC resources as necessary during times of varying demand—see here for more details.

In summary, keep your eye on the emerging trend of new PaaS and IaaS technologies that are available for licensing within your own data center as you consider how you might transition applications from inside your data center to the cloud.