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Parent Category: Platform as a Service (PaaS)
With the emergence of software as a service (SaaS) over the past decade, many software vendors and companies have accelerated their development of new applications hosted and delivered via the Web.
But until recently, software developers creating a SaaS offering has had to build their own hosting and service delivery infrastructure. That has all changed in the past few years with the rise of platform-as-a-service. PaaS is the online equivalent of conventional computing platforms, providing a ready-made infrastructure on which a software developer can rapidly build and deliver a SaaS application.
While many are still somewhat wary of binding their fate to that of an emerging platform provider, the utilization of PaaS can lead to dramatic reductions in development costs and timescales. By lowering barriers to entry and shortening time-to-market, PaaS supercharges SaaS, accelerating the pace of innovation and intensifying competition.
The advent of PaaS will entirely change the game for software development – not only for those who choose to introduce SaaS offerings, but also those who remain wedded to conventionally licensed, customer-operated software products. PaaS changes the competitive landscape as follows
- Dramatically faster innovation cycles. PaaS implements
the iterative, continuous improvement upgrade model of
SaaS, allowing developers to monitor and respond to
customer usage and feedback, and rapidly incorporate the
latest functionality into their own applications. - Hugely lowered price points. The shared, pay-as-you-go,
elastic infrastructure of PaaS slashes developers’ costs
across multiple dimensions, resulting in massively reduced
development and operations costs. This then enables a lower
pricepoints for software developed using this approach. - New players from lowered barriers to entry.
The low costs to get started on a PaaS provider’s
infrastructure attract huge numbers of market entrants who
would not be able to fund their own infrastructure,
significantly increasing innovation and competition. - New business models, propositions, partner channels
and routes to market. The ‘as-a-service’ business model
opens up new ways of offering products and bringing them
to market, many of them highly disruptive to established
models. The components necessary to deploy a software solution
(hosting, management, billing, middleware, front-end, and other)
can all be decoupled from eachother.
It is imperative for any large scale software development effort to understand and evaluate the impact of PaaS on their business model. Key to that understanding is to recognize that PaaS is more than just another platform. It’s a new kind of platform. The dynamics of PaaS are different than conventional software platforms. Developers should beware of assessing PaaS alternatives on criteria that are no longer valid when applied to PaaS.
| Heroku http://www.heroku.com/ Heroku provides application development framworks (Ruby and Node.js as of recently) as a service. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce.com for about $212 Million
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| VMForce from VMWare and Salesforce.com http://www.vmforce.com/ VMForce enables the development and deployment of enterprise Java applications. It was launched as a partnership between VMWare and Salesforce.com. VMWare has subsequently launched Clound Foundry.
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| Joyent http://www.joyent.com/ Joyent cloud provides an Infrastructure as as Service offering. In addition, its Platform as a Service offering provides a Node.js hosted application development environment.
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| OpenShift by Redhat https://openshift.redhat.com/app/ Openshift (previously Makara) offers an industrial strengh on-demand platform to multiple frameworks to develop and deploy cloud applications.
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| Force.com (from Salesforce.com) http://www.salesforce.com/platform/ Force.com is Salesforce.com 's suite of services which enable the rapid development and deployment of enterprise applications. This includes VMforce (a joint initiative with VMware), and database.com , which is Salesforce's cloud database platform
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| Dotcloud and Duostack http://www.dotcloud.com/ Dotcloud joined forces with Duostack to provide innovative PaaS (Platforms as a Service) infrastructure together. GigaOM article
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| Cloud Foundry from VMware http://www.cloudfoundry.com/ Platform as a Service (PaaS) from VMware enabling users to build and run their Spring, Ruby or Node.js applications. A unique feature of Cloud Foundry is the ability to download and run the platform yourself - and the whole thing is open source. This downloaded "Micro Cloud" does everything that the online service does, including self-monitoring and automatically provisioning new instances. This create a viable secure alternative for large enterprises, enabling them to easily create a modern development environment without putting company apps on external evironments such as Heroku or Engine Yard. However, you can easily move from a private cloud to the Cloud Foundry open cloud services when you do feel like it.
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| Google App Engine http://code.google.com/appengine/ Google Apps allows companies to code and deploy apps on the same systems as Google's applications.
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| Windows Azure http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/ Windows Azure and SQL Azure enable you to build, host and scale applications in Microsoft datacenters. They require no up-front expenses, no long term commitment, and enable you to pay only for the resources you use.
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| Corent Technology http://www.corenttechnology.com/ Transform existing Java applications into multi-tenant, software-as-a-service applications and deploy them to the clould.
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| apprenda http://apprenda.com/ Enables organizations to deploy a private PaaS. Empowers enterprise IT organizations with a private cloud application platform for building, deploying, and running cloud applications using the Microsoft stack.
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