The Wisdom Of The PaaS Crowd

By Monica Mehta

Research firm IDC forecasts that the worldwide public platform as a service (PaaS) market is expected to grow to more than $14 billion in 2017. But the concept of PaaS is still being understood fully . What do customers want when it comes to the cloud, how does PaaS fulfill those needs, and what types of PaaS offerings will do the job?

“When they move to the cloud, people are no longer only looking for software as a service or infrastructure as a service,” says Mike Lehmann, Oracle’s vice president of product management. “They’re thinking of bringing over application platforms and workloads to gain some of the same benefits for the application layer—standardization, faster deployment, automation with more flexible capital expenditure approaches, and seamless integration.”

Oracle recently participated in a survey asking more than 300 IT leaders and practitioners in companies worldwide about their use of PaaS. The respondents’ answers revealed five best practices from companies that found success with PaaS. We took a deeper look at the results with Lehmann, and gained some insights into the wisdom of the crowd. In this case, what are companies that have adopted an effective PaaS solution achieving?

1. Faster, More Efficient Development Cycles

To deploy a new application on premises, IT has to procure, install, and configure hardware, a database, an application server, and a development environment. “It takes some customers weeks or even months to work through the mechanics of hardware procurement and setup, and to install everything they need before they even start writing one line of code for their custom application or deploying a prebuilt application,” says Lehmann.

With a comprehensive PaaS solution, months can be shrunk to an hour. “I don’t want to say it’s magic, but to some degree that’s what’s happening,” says Lehmann. “We’re taking out a layer that is very process-bound and bureaucratic on premises and making it on demand and completely automated. And that’s what the Oracle cloud gives you—an out-of-the-box, standardized environment where you can start building the application or deploying the application or data in an hour.”

A US financial services company that Lehmann worked with had a very large on-premises data center running Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database. The marketing, finance, and sales departments all had a need for custom apps that would take one to two months to build. However, their data center admins informed them it would be eight to 12 weeks before they could have the physical environment to build the apps.

“When they saw what we were doing in the Oracle cloud, they said, ‘You mean I can start deploying my promotional campaign in your cloud in an hour? That’s incredible,’ ” says Lehmann. “Time to value and the ability to quickly deliver campaign-type activities was a huge deciding factor for them to move to PaaS.”

2. Capacity on Demand
A large sports and marketing organization in Europe needed to deliver different social media campaigns to its audiences. Its customer demand was high during the active sports season, and very low at other times of the year. Procuring and maintaining on-premises infrastructure and software with such fluctuations would have been costly and time-consuming. But “one of the beauties in terms of the cloud is this ability to have capacity on demand,” says Lehmann. “We’re giving you the infrastructure, platform, and software out of the box in the cloud, with service-level guarantees, so you no longer have to worry about maintaining it as your business demand changes.”

3. Portability Between Platforms

For companies with a hybrid cloud—for example, developmental testing in the public cloud and mission-critical production on premises—portability between all platforms is essential. A major European logistics company was running very large, complex, mission-critical applications on premises in its data centers. Its development environments were taking a long time to create and deploy. In order to gain a faster, more agile development environment, it adopted PaaS. It was able to move the same software, database, application server, and software it was already using for development, with the identical standards, to the cloud quickly.

“That gave them a huge acceleration in their ability to make changes and extend their on-premises applications,” says Lehmann. “Now they can do all of their development tests in the cloud with the identical software that they’re running on premises.” And they are able to do so without being locked into their decision, mitigating the risk associated with moving across different platforms for the cloud.

“For a company that wants to experiment with moving to the cloud, this is a low-risk opportunity to become familiar with the cloud—to try it out for development testing, or for one app, or one part of the organization, to see how successful it is,” says Lehmann. “If it’s not, they can bring it back on premises.”

4. Easier Mobile Application Development

Imagine you’re building an application that will allow your sales force to query a particular customer on the go. The app should be accessible on a variety of mobile devices, and should connect to your customer relationship management system. A comprehensive, integrated PaaS offering will enable you to build the app on top of your CRM environment, and customize it to your sales force’s needs.

“What you need is a development environment that not only gives you modern, standardized, integrated development tools and runtimes with it, but one that is also really smart about being able to integrate into your back-end services that you want to mobilize,” says Lehmann. “Our cloud services can enable you to declaratively connect, through modern standards such as representational state transfer (REST), to those on premises and cloud systems, and then build very user-friendly, device-tailored mobile interfaces out of that infrastructure.”

The True Value of PaaS

Survey results show that companies are learning how valuable PaaS can be to their business, and PaaS best practices are emerging. The wisdom of the crowd says that a PaaS offering should help developers easily and quickly build applications that integrate with the complex modern IT environment, which is filled with disparate information from multiple sources, and apps that are customized and prebuilt, on-premises and in the cloud.

With a comprehensive, end-to-end PaaS solution such as Oracle’s, “there is a whole set of additional services—database, Java, mobility, integration, out of the box, and on demand,” says Lehmann. “That’s a value that very few others, if any, can deliver in the cloud. ”