There is no denying that 2011 was boom time for ‘Platform-as-a-service’ (Paas), as the industry saw new Paas products debut through the year. Additionally, it was also the year Salesforce.com acquired Paas industry-leader Heroku in a US$250million deal indicating the maturing of the segment with the industry.
The surge in growth of PaaS appears to be the innovative, hot features in management, administration and introduction of multiple languages. Examples are Engine Yard and Heroku which started out as Ruby-on-Rails and eventually added Java to the portfolio.
However, Lucas Carlson, the CEO of AppFog, a leading PaaS provider, believes that PaaS in 2012 would look beyond feature-wars and instead aim at specialisation,”There are a lot of features that differentiate different platforms-as-a-service.”
Additionally, community and eventually ecosystem could become the differentiator he believes, “I think what is going to make the difference is going to be something harder to measure externally than features,” “What I feel is going to make the difference is a vibrant and healthy ecosystem.”
CTO of Heroku, Adam Wiggins, is of the strong opinion that PaaS today, is only about public cloud, which he believes is ‘entirely vapour,’ and speaks about it thus, “My opinion—and this is not a widely held opinion—is that private cloud is total BS. If you make it private it is no longer cloud. You destroy all the value you get from cloud by making it something you have to run yourself. Anyone pursuing that path is advocating a false trail.”