Cloud Platform As A Service: Drivers and Opportunities

Brane, as a Platform company, is fully committed to enhance the Cloud Application development experience. We believe there is a lot to be done to drastically simplify how apps are defined, deployed and managed over the cloud. (See my upcoming EclipseCon presentation)
This blog captures drivers of Cloud based applications, and a snap-shot of the “Platform As A Service” offerings as well as the opportunities that lie ahead for Platform players like Brane.

Self Service Enterprise Apps

Information-intensive companies in financial services, health care, logistics and other industries put enormous resources into their information technology infrastructure to develop custom mission critical applications that enhance their value proposition. Traditionally application development processes involve mostly manual coding. Highly skilled and experienced developers are high in demand. Business knowledge is typically buried in the code. 

56% of enterprise application development projects exceed their budget and 84% are late.

Gartner Report

IT executives facing budget constraints and skill shortages look for ways to systematically reduce costs, provide faster time to value, and improve reliability: increasingly they are turning to “Cloud Computing”.

Cloud computing empowers self-service (SAAS) apps that scale extremely well on-demand and supports attractive pricing models where customers pay as much as they use the Cloud service, with no up-front hardware or software development costs. Cloud Computing is a game changer as it eliminates the costs and complexity of buying, configuring, and managing the hardware and software needed to build and deploy applications.

Public vs. Private Cloud

Persistent concerns over security, availability, and licensing expenses many organizations increasingly are to implement Cloud applications on “private” clouds with the option to scale to “public” resources on demand. As such there is a significant demand for robust Cloud Platforms offered as a Service (PAAS).

Mobile Apps

Demand for mobile applications is another factor fueling the demand for Cloud Platform Services. While most first generation mobile applications are stand-alone apps, companies who want to offer portfolio of next generation mobile applications will increasingly rely on shared services such as governance, account management, workflow, single-sign-on, social networking etc.

Transformation of Legacy Apps

Cloud Computing is also acting as a catalyst for large enterprises who want transform aging monolithic applications using best practice Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) patterns (See InfoWorld).

Rule Engines

Another potential driver for Cloud Computing is the demand for high-performance Rule Engine Management Systems (REMS) to be used in low-mid range of the Enterprise Application market. REMSs automate business policies in custom and composite applications, eliminating manual coding, lowering maintenance costs, increasing accuracy and consistency in implementation. They have become main stream especially in applications which has large numbers of highly variable decision, or when the business rules are frequently changed, and high degree of IT and business collaboration is desired.

Rule engines have been successfully deployed on especially on the high end enterprise companies (such as Finance, and Insurance). Adoption at the low-end has been slow due to affordability of specialized talent, well as the fact that they are resource intensive to ensure operation at linear scalability. Cloud computing can drastically increase the adoption of rule engines for both low and high ends of the market, as it can naturally support on-demand resource allocation required for complex rules, and/or large databases.

Existing Cloud Platform Service Providers

Among the established “Platform as a Service” players: Amazon and SalesForce.com recently made Relational “Persistence As A Service” as part of their Cloud Platform offerings.
Google’s AppEngine, on the other hand has not yet demonstrated maturity and responsiveness to the needs for large Enterprise applications.

Despite fact that SalesForce.com’s Force.com platform which bundles database.com gained considerable traction (185K+ apps), it has not captured the imagination of developers due to its perceived proprietary nature .

Force.com’s approach with its “No-Software” logo is proof positive that sophisticated applications can be put together fast from declaratively, where application patterns and configuration is captured in terms of a domain specific language.

Market

The size for custom enterprise application market is measured in 10s of billions of dollars.
According to Gartner, Cloud Computing market is growing at over 20% with a projected five year CAGR of 26.3%.
Spending on worldwide cloud services passed $56.3 billion in 2009 ( 21.3% increase over 2008), and estimated to exceed $150 billion in 2013.
Systems infrastructure delivered as a service was $2.5 billion in 2008 and $3.2 billion in 2009.
Cloud application services, evolving from software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings reached nearly $6 billion in 2009.
Much of the growth represents a transfer of traditional IT services to the new cloud model, as well as scope for creation of new business and revenue streams.

Cloud Platform As a Service is expected to bite a significant portion of this pie. Cloud-based mobile applications market alone is expected to grow 88% annually reaching $9.5 billion by 2014 (See Juniper Research).

Opportunities

To following diagram illustrates the type of services enterprises facing the challenges described above would expect from their Cloud Platform Service Providers:

While most of the “service” boxes represented in the Infrastructure section in the above diagram are available at increasing levels of maturity, -excluding the proprietary platforms- current service offerings in the Application Service layer is limited to: Persistence, Authentication, and Social Networking.

This presents opportunities for Cloud PAAS players to develop an open platform that combines sophisticated declarative business rules, business process management, and integration with existing services to support mission-critical enterprise applications that can scale on demand on the cloud infrastructure.

Services expected for Business Intelligence and components of an ideal IDE are beyond the scope of this blog.

We also expect “Cloud in a Box” service offerings for companies who hesitate to jump to public Cloud services with their sensitive data. These boxes would optionally have on demand access to virtually limitless resources of the public Cloud.

Kagan Turgut
Founder, Brane Corp