Pick your PaaS strategy
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Questions to ask before migrating to an online, on-demand platform
By Alexandra Weber Morales
June 1, 2008 —
Whose platform should I choose? Seek platform expertise that dovetails with your technical, marketing or business goals. “We’re all coming at PaaS from different directions: search, storefront, business applications, financial,” says Salesforce’s Parker Harris.
Should I build my own platform? That’s the route Progress Software’s Colleen Smith advises if you dominate your vertical market. Her company and others provide infrastructure services.
Will there be vendor lock-in? Once you make a platform play, there’s no point in porting your app around. Look for open, standards-based services, languages and data policies.
How do I evaluate the technology? Ask around. You may not need to use all the pieces in a PaaS stack. “You can choose to use Apex or not, depending on the project,” says Salesforce consultant Ted Elliott. “It doesn’t package well. Then there’s straight configuration. Ninety percent of what we do is that, and only 10% is Apex.”
Will my data be secure? Multiple certifications exist to rubber-stamp security and privacy. Most platform providers claim they’ve designed for faulty hardware so you don’t have to. But just one breach or service outage would make a serious dent in consumer confidence with utility computing. Read the newspaper.
Aren’t Web services and SOA good enough? The latency penalty of non-local data is one reason cloud computing makes sense. “You could code a custom Web service API in Python and have the app on your own server that calls using standard HTTP. But there are real performance benefits to having it all in one place. You’ve got a round-trip latency of 200 to 500 milliseconds to get a response. If data is local, it’s only 10 or 20 ms.”
It’s also less work than building a brand-new SOA strategy. “[With PaaS,] I don’t have to worry about an enterprise having an SOA gateway that can accept an in-bound request,” says Appirio’s Narinder Singh.
What will this cost? Perhaps the least novel aspect of PaaS is the usage-based pricing, a model as dated as the mainframes that charge by it. In addition to per-transaction pricing, there may be up-front fees for licenses, training, maintenance and support. “The difference between Progress and Oracle is that we provide an ISV all the tools free. Once they deploy, they pay a royalty percentage for usage of the application that varies from 5% to 25%,” says Smith, depending on the value of the Progress components used.
There are also certification costs for vendors that wish to list their wares on Salesforce’s AppExchange. “I have an app on there that I did pay to certify. That is to allow a Salesforce user to link to my on-premises application. The certification is to ensure that it wouldn’t break anything on Salesforce.com,” explains Coda’s Jeremy Roche.
But the broader cloud computing offerings, which have a consumer focus, will likely choose simple annual subscription models. “With Google coming into this market, it’s going to put a tremendous downward pressure on the pricing,” says Lu Kabir, co-founder of Insights On Demand, a Silicon Valley SaaS provider looking for a PaaS that can provide scalability benefits.
What would Redmond do? In April, Microsoft announced a “software plus services” play with Live Mesh and countered Salesforce’s CRM with the contention that Microsoft CRM can easily be customized for other relationship management applications using Windows and SQL. Reaction to those announcements has been muted.
Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, Microsoft
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