The Rise of PaaS

After Software as a Service (SaaS) we are now slowly entering the domain of Platform as a Service (PaaS). As the Internet speeds pickup and our hardware increasingly becomes more powerful, there is little to stop this transition. With enough competition in the domain it would possibly present benefits to a lot of people from a business point of view as it would further democratize application development.

I feel that the three key factors that need to be taken into consideration before either adopting or selling PaaS:

1. Security: Keeping proprietary code on alien servers may be hard to stomach for many businesses if they fear data-theft or data-loss. This is always going to be top-priority and reputation is everything. It would make sense only for the big and established brands to enter the arena immediately, so to say.
2. Speed: Technically proficient companies may feel that they are ceding control of the speed of application as they would no longer control many things in the server, database and application development. For many small and medium business owners, though, this may not be as big a consideration. Nevertheless, the companies attempting to enter PaaS will perhaps counter this by giving more configuration options and partnering with network accelerators.
3. Portability: This would be another major issue. With their experience with computing over the last so many years, business owners in general would hate to tie down themselves with any specific PaaS provider. This means PaaS provider would have to either leverage some existing and popular framework (aka Red Hat) or invent and popularize an entirely new one (aka SalesForce). Both challenges are not for the faint-hearted!

With respect to development of Rich Internet Applications, this would only further complicate the equation in this nascent field. Tie-ups, support, marketing and smart technical development is the way ahead, I guess, as reach somehow always wins over technology (especially when the product can be potentially commoditized). The big horses to watch include Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, HP and SalesForce. I am sure many others would try as well. Lets see how this story unfolds.