In my previous post PaaS or fail I took a brief look at what platform-as-a-service (PaaS) was and how it was something every software development organization would be facing
There is quite a debate ongoing as to whether public clouds, being encouraged by a consortium of salesforce.com, Google, Amazon and others are the way to go for corporations looking to make their next investment in application development.
For many corporations, their experience with the cloud has been primarily through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) with applications such as salesforce.com and Netsuite. With salesforce.com most notably now touting Force.com a PaaS, for wide-scale application development and deployment, and GoogleAppEngine offerings becoming more robust and sophisticated, corporations are becoming more serious in their consideration of “public” cloud technologies for corporate use.
But not so fast, the reality is that there is still alot of skittishness out there around exposing valuable corporate data outside of the firewall, in addition to internal IT wanting much more control over resources and networks that a public cloud deployment would allow. A perfect opening for the concept of Private Clouds which, as you would expect, the mega-vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, VMware openly support and endorse. This is a high-stakes battle for who gets to offer what hardware, software and services as corporations formulate their cloud strategy. PaaS is therefore a key component of this war since the corresponding PaaS leads the way to the associated public or private cloud. It remains to be seen which corporations will emerge out of the desert and pick their PaaS of choice, for now it’s wide-open.