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Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technologies are emerging as key enablers to turn aspiration into reality. By providing the organization with a technical base to design systems that permit the rapid reassembly of business processes to suit new business needs, IT essentially enables the organization to launch and learn from quick, low-cost experiments. It becomes possible to innovate rapidly and react to market shifts in ways that were simply impractical before. For instance, a call center can quickly test a possible new protocol for flagging and prioritizing calls regarding the latest product release, working with a subset of customer service representatives. If customer satisfaction scores go up, the protocol can be integrated into the standard procedure; if not, the experiment can be rapidly iterated or scrapped.

A string of pearls
For years, many IT organizations have been striving for these levels of agility. (At a recent conference for CIOs, the chief executive of a leading software vendor depicted business logic as a string of pearls that can easily be restrung.) They’ve tried to structure applications as collections of services. They’ve also invested substantially in integration efforts—think middleware—and funded custom development to extend the services. These efforts have also tended to remain in-house—a burden for all concerned. CIOs are now looking outside their four walls to find easier paths to IT agility.

Service level commitment
PaaS offerings—defined as platforms sourced from and hosted by a service provider that handles the platform’s maintenance, evolution, and operation—have been touted as an option, but until recently have not been sufficiently developed to be practical. Platform providers were not prepared to commit to the service level agreements (SLAs) that CIOs would typically require before moving critical business applications to the platform. Similarly, CIOs may not have had clarity on how PaaS would impact their organizations’ technology direction.

But the PaaS landscape is changing fast. More IT departments are now engaging and experimenting with PaaS, although primarily for ancillary services. For example, security company G4S is about to deploy a cash-intransit application on Azure. And Lionsgate, a global entertainment company, is deploying its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to Amazon Web Services.

That said, it is tempting for CIOs and their top managers to evaluate PaaS as a cost-saving measure, using technical specifications as their lens. If they continue to do this, they will miss a large part of PaaS’s potential. Instead, the key is to stay focused on the business services that will require a significant level of innovation, flexibility, iteration, and, therefore, experimentation over the lifetime of an application. It is PaaS’s ability to enable the business to act and react quickly that will ultimately differentiate the organization from its competitors.

Additional capabilities
Platform providers have made significant strides, adding capabilities that were not typical this time last year. Data options on various platforms have increased: Google now offers Google Cloud SQL for use with Google App Engine, and Microsoft is piloting a Hadoop distribution on Azure. Enterprises that want to leverage their current developers’ skills now have Java based PaaS, such as Red Hat’s OpenShift. And operational support—one of the biggest concerns for any IT shop—is now available. For instance, Rackspace now provides support for OpenStack. There is also an accelerating convergence toward the PaaS space as the other as-a-service players move up and down the stack, each pushing toward a more complete set of capabilities on every layer.

Today, providers with rich catalogues of business services—the software-as-a-service (SaaS) players, for example—are pushing down the stack, offering platform capabilities to augment their offerings. Salesforce, NetSuite, and Workday are actively moving into the PaaS space. SAP and Oracle are also expanding the relevance of their SaaS offerings with PaaS. Here we’ll see an upsurge in PaaS “app stores” that unify the services offered on the platform; lightweight software engineering practices for assembling solutions will be the norm.

App stores
PaaS app stores such as Salesforce’s AppExchange, Intuit Marketplace, and Apperian are just the beginning. At the same time, providers with strong infrastructure capabilities—such as the traditional infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) players—are busily adding platform services in order to climb the stack. In the short term, the emphasis here will be on custom development. For instance, VMware has moved from virtualization products into virtualization infrastructure, and now is establishing itself as a cloud platform provider with the introduction of Cloud Foundry. Others—such as Red Hat, through its OpenShift PaaS offering—are adopting similar strategies.

PaaS involves shorter development cycles, enabling organizations to quickly iterate functionality and respond more nimbly to short-term opportunities. For example, during holiday-shopping sales surges, the platform allows the business to quickly add new functionality without an 18-month development life cycle.

At the most basic level, PaaS must offer a breadth of applications and services that attract business users—such as inventory management or payroll. But, at the root, if platforms are to be truly viable, providers will need to offer—and IT leaders will need to look for—reusable business services, integration capabilities, and extension capabilities.

Reusable business services
In general, the more services that can be shared on a common platform—from financial management services, say, to inventory management—the easier it will be to handle the inevitable integration challenges, to hold down costs, and to demonstrate the true flexibility of PaaS. These services can be hosted as part of the platform and should be run and maintained with a set of SLAs. In many cases, they are optimized for the infrastructure they are running on. When evaluating PaaS options, IT leaders also have to be alert to the likelihood and consequences of platform lock-in. As they’re assessing platform choices, they need to be careful that one part of their cloud strategy doesn’t undermine another. For instance, the selection of a PaaS may affect their ability to use hybrid cloud for processes where seamless operation across on-premise and off-premise systems is needed.

Hybrid
Some platforms make it difficult to seamlessly move services and applications back in-house from the cloud. For example, users of  Force.com are tied to that platform; it is not designed to accommodate an in-house version of its software stack. If users wish to move services back inside, they have to commit to some level of redevelopment. By contrast, other platforms, such as Azure and Cloud Foundry, do provide this flexibility because they allow users to replicate the stack in their own data centers, making it fairly straightforward to move services or data back into their own environments if they choose to do so. These types of platforms are useful for “cloudbursting” scenarios—handling overflow loads such as those incurred by seasonal sales spikes or end-of-fiscalyear processing. Even more crucial for many organizations, they simplify already difficult issues of data distribution like, for instance, when some parts of customer data must be kept in-house for policy or regulatory reasons.

Another desirable characteristic of hybrid platforms is that they offer some insurance if the PaaS provider isn’t meeting a company’s SLAs or if the security risks of using as-a-service technologies are deemed unacceptable. In effect, they provide an exit strategy, allowing companies to pull the applications back in-house when necessary.

However, these types of platforms have not dealt significantly with reusable business service catalogs to date, and the services that do exist are typically hosted third-party services. In such

scenarios, bringing services back in-house is still uncharted territory—both technically and in terms of business issues such as licensing.

One important guideline to bear in mind: today, use of PaaS offerings looks a lot more like outsourcing, so when you’re picking a platform, you’re effectively picking a partner rather than a software vendor.

Process driven
The path to utilizing platform-as-a-service will not be short; nor will moving every business process to PaaS make sense while the offerings are still maturing.

But the payout can be big for those that start the journey now with the right processes. Do you know which processes are the right ones? Do you have a plan for how IT will be able to support them?
 

This article is an edited version of the original text: The Accenture Technology Vision 2012