Private PaaS is For Real

Large enterprises are very interested in the PaaS value proposition, but much less interested in making strategic commitments to public PaaS. This is generally true of public cloud overall. Only in the SaaS area do we see substantially less durdling by our enterprise clients. My working theory is that this is mostly because popular SaaS options are a cut above their packaged counterparts in capability, usability, and spending flexibility; plus, the business won’t take no for an answer. The differentiation available in some SaaS is too alluring to ignore. 

The same has so far not proved consistently true for public cloud IaaS and PaaS. To be sure, these areas are growing; recent financial analyst AWS revenue estimates are impressive indeed. Step back a minute and let the reality sink in that the market for cloud services is at least as large as the existing market for enterprise IT (hardware, software, and hosting) itself – then, the AWS number doesn’t look nearly as big. There’s still a lot more cash burned in traditional data centers than there will be in public cloud IaaS and PaaS for some time. We can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether that’s a good thing or not, but it is what it is…

And, what IT is, at least with respect to PaaS, is a growing enterprise desire for Private PaaS. Mock it at your peril – just like private cloud, the ship has sailed and will be pulling into a harbor within an enterprise data center near you. The value proposition for Private PaaS seems compelling – an increasing number of stories suggest that Private PaaS can get you both reduced operational burden and higher developer productivity. As anybody who reads my blog knows, I think that developer productivity is a big deal.

Private PaaS is coming, but how do you adopt it if you’re the “classic” enterprise IT organization with a diverse portfolio of home-grown applications and integrations, running on what I will for the purposes of this discussion call “classic” middleware? Do you wait around until 2015 (or later) for Java EE 8 to bring you the cloudy features you’re looking for, now that we know for sure that Java EE 7 won’t have any? Or, do you just wait for your preferred IT megavendor to get around to offering you a for-real, multitenant, cloud-native, Private PaaS that goes beyond simply slapping a pre-built middleware stack onto a virtual machine?

If for your enterprise, technology is just a necessary evil, a cost of doing business, then the answer is probably yes: wait until the early movers have wrung all the new value from the PaaS model and pick it up when prices are cheap and the systems commoditized. My guess is nobody reading this blog feels that way about IT.

If for your enterprise, technology is expected to expand the business, to serve as a differentiator in your market, to deliver what MBA types like to call competitive advantage – then Private PaaS can no longer be ignored.