Programmable SaaS? That's platform as a service

By Alexandra Weber Morales

June 1, 2008 —

Ted C. Mesa is not a geek—“you’d need my CIO to give you that answer,” he says when pressed about the technical underpinnings of his company’s shipping management software-as-a-service—but he knows his business. As president and founder of Point&Ship Software, in Walnut Creek, Calif., Mesa has merged overnight package delivery experience with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, formulating a novel Web-based solution.

“In 1997, one of our clients said, ‘We want to be a paperless company by 2000.’ So we retooled our billing system and added in other carriers. Then, Sarbanes-Oxley kicked into gear, meaning public companies and every private company exceeding US$40 million in revenue had to validate and categorize all expenses. Thanks to the Enrons and MCIs of the world, shipping has shifted from the mailroom to the boardroom.”

Meanwhile, shipping’s importance continues to rise. Increasingly, Point&Ship’s .NET and SQL Server-based SaaS is interacting with other applications, such as a major retailer’s point-of-sale (POS) system. “At the POS, they can literally click on our logo and tell the customer how much shipping will cost. The big-business implication is: It’s real-time information and it’s also capturing an expense they don’t capture today.”

Not only have Mesa’s customers embraced the Web as an interactive platform, but also, according to Mesa, “No one is looking to put in servers anymore; everyone wants on-demand services. Our clients are saying everything is browser-based.” According to Mesa, that interest prompts him to consider a new evolution: offering his shipping management service as a programmable platform.

“Platform as a service is the quantum shift we’ve all been waiting for,” Mesa said. “You’re nimble, your ROI drops significantly and the impact is immediate.”

While companies such as Point&Ship don’t make the nightly news, they are vital to a new ecosystem built around PaaS. But how has this evolution emerged?

Many paths to PaaS
When it comes to software, the big new thing isn’t always so new. In 1961, Turing Award-winner John McCarthy predicted utility computing. But nearly 40 years passed before the application service provider (ASP) concept approached viability.

“[The ASP] was a dead end,” says Parker Harris, executive vice president and co-founder of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com. “They solved the utility model, but the applications were limited for customization. They put all their intellectual property into worrying about hosted single tenancy, and they didn’t have economies of scale.”

Meanwhile, the millennial service-oriented architecture craze was pushing standardization. Web services APIs quickly sprouted off most applications, making their data and processes accessible to other entities via the Internet. Presciently, Salesforce.com launched its distinctive “1-800-NO-SOFTWARE” marketing campaign and a customer relationship management SaaS.

Since that watershed, three trends have enabled the leap to PaaS: First, a plethora of providers, from massive to minuscule, have opened SaaS storefronts. Second, a swarm of Web-based challengers to Microsoft’s desktop hegemony is beginning to eat into the giant: While OpenOffice.org once attracted ridicule, 30boxes, Google Apps, ThinkFree and Zoho are now among many workable online alternatives to the blue screen of death. Third, consumers and business managers alike are sick of media files clogging their machines and are ready to subscribe to on-demand application services. And Amazon is filling that need by renting out its data centers and offering innovations, such as the Simple Storage Service (S3) and EC2 generic cloud computing.

At this point, it’s wise to consider LoudCloud, Netscape and Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen’s three-level categorization of PaaS. Level one is the Web services-type "access API," as seen on Delicious, eBay, Flickr and PayPal. Level two is the "plug-in API," which allows outside code to be injected and run on such platforms as Facebook, Firefox and PhotoShop. But the configuration Andreessen says that warrants rapt attention is level three’s "runtime environment," which embeds developer code in the platform (such as Amazon, Google App Engine, Ning, Salesforce.com and Second Life). This also happens to be the hardest to build from the ground up.

The cacophony around these multiple definitions of “platform” is causing confusion. But the benefits of “level three” PaaS are notable. According to Salt Lake City-based Bungee Labs, PaaS attracts:

end users searching for interactive applications that don’t require installs or downloads;
developers seeking innovation, tested components and seamless collaboration;
IT managers tired of fretting about infrastructure costs and maintenance; and
business managers burned by too many software development death marches.

Further, there’s an advantage for all players: They can leave the heavy lifting—managing developer tools, collaboration, multi-tenancy, concurrency, scalability, storage, failover and security—to the service provider.

Forcing the issue
Few companies have mastered the art of buzz as well as Salesforce.com has, and that befits a CRM vendor. Is there a sizable steak behind the company’s sizzle? The point may have been the subject of punditry, but technology and influence are nearly equally important in the PaaS market.

“People love to say Salesforce is a good marketing machine. I’m not saying they aren’t, but the on-demand model that they’ve attached themselves to is a better one for innovating quickly,” says Narinder Singh, co-founder and chief marketing officer for Appirio, a Silicon Valley maker of several Salesforce/Google Apps mashups (see the Google Apps category at www.salesforce.com/appexchange.) “Their product works better, and they innovate faster than anyone else. The rest of the industry has spent the last five years denying that.”

Ted Elliott, CEO of Jobscience, a San Francisco consultancy and ISV, agrees. “Salesforce can be run entirely by business analysts. We started moving everything that we do to Salesforce: Development, customer service, sales, marketing—whatever you can think of, we’re doing it in Salesforce.”

Emboldened by the success of his Salesforce-based HR recruiting software, Elliott is not only reselling the Salesforce platform, but he’s also adding consultants to his own stable. “There’s a tremendous untapped market of those who have purchased Salesforce and don’t necessarily have the time or expertise to customize it. Some don’t think three-dimensionally when it comes to business processes.”

That’s exactly the kind of fervor Harris likes to see in the wake of the first-quarter 2008 announcements around Force.com PaaS partnerships with Appirio, Google and others. It’s an evolution similar to that of Point&Ship and myriad other ISVs that began with a successful SaaS solution and then found that its clients were doing their own customizations to the product.

According to Salesforce chief marketing officer Clarence So, no stranger to the grand statement, this shift mirrors Microsoft’s historic establishment of the Windows platform. While Harris acknowledges that many of the 750 applications currently available on Salesforce’s AppExchange marketplace are extensions of the CRM concept, “We are going into a lot of different verticals. More and more people are looking at us as a pure-play platform.” One example is Harrogate, U.K.-based Coda, which has used Force to build accounts receivable solutions.

“Our history is as an on-premises ISV,” said Coda chief executive Jeremy Roche. “Our use of PaaS is to get us into the on-demand marketplace in as painless a way as possible. We didn’t want to hand-crank the entire on-demand stack ourselves and build our own multi-tenancy platform. Our time from commitment to writing application code was approximately three weeks. We’ve been writing finance apps for 30 years—we have the requirements catalog. We didn’t have the platform.”

The full-featured development environment, with an Eclipse-based IDE for coding in Apex (the Java variant used to program the Force platform), was palatable to Coda’s hard-core developers. What’s more, there are 41,000 customers on Salesforce.com. “If I want to get to that size in the SaaS market, I need a platform like Salesforce,” says Roche.

Pieces of the puzzle
True to its customer-focused origins, Salesforce has paid close attention to the details of providing a popular platform that combines reliability, ease-of-use and power. Not sure what to build? Check the IdeaExchange. Not sure how to build it? Check AppExchange for similar processes adapted to different domains. Wondering what tools you need? Look no further than the Force.com IDE, which the company claims as “the world's first integrated development environment for platform-as-a-service,” released as a developer preview in January.

Building, deploying and versioning Force.com components all can occur in the Eclipse-based IDE. Visualforce pages (based on Java server faces) can be designed for a completely custom look. Apex classes and triggers can be written with auto-complete tips and debugged via a Test Runner that reports the percentage of code coverage, among other things. The IDE also works with any Eclipse-enabled version control system.

“One interesting aspect that’s not often noted about our platform is that we do control the whole life cycle. We can instill best practices, such as over 80% testing coverage. You write unit tests in Apex, and it’s the same as using JUnit,” says Harris, who notes that Salesforce practices agile development methodologies internally. “We are opening up an interface to the metadata model, code and workflow. We are also creating data modeling tools for our platform.

“I don’t think enough people are putting the Model-View-Controller framework to use, where Visualforce is the view, Apex is the logic/controller and data modeling is the model. You can build any database-backed business application, whereas in true Web services, you have very little control over database consistency.”

Everyone’s a critic
In the software development world, however, some see Salesforce’s PaaS play as old school.

“That’s really not anything different than Peoplesoft with Peopletools,” says Colleen Smith, vice president of software as a service for Progress Software, in Bedford, Mass. “Every large ERP [enterprise resource planning] vendor provided some kind of application platform. The difference now is that it’s a hosted service.”

Brought on three years ago to launch the developer tools company’s SaaS strategy, Smith helps her largest ISV clients build out their own platforms using Progress OpenEdge. One important point, she stresses, is to look at the client base of the platform vendor.

“Salesforce is based around sales force automation. One of our clients is Datasul, in the ERP market. They used Progress to build out their fleet management SaaS. They also did a small fleet management module with Salesforce, and said, ‘This is not really giving us any leads,’ ” said Smith.

Similarly, Point&Ship’s Mesa believes Salesforce’s small to medium-sized business clientele isn’t in the sweet spot for his product, which targets large enterprises feeling the pain of Sarbanes-Oxley. But Coda’s Roche chose Force.com over the competing NetSuite platform for the opposite reason: “NetSuite is a financial application, so in my case all I’d be able to do is extend their financial application,” he said. More important to Coda was the opportunity to reach thousands of new customers already on the Force platform.

It’s clear that Salesforce is working hard to shed any concerns that CRM is its only strength. “Salesforce’s biggest disadvantage today is the word ‘sales’ in front of ‘force,’ ” jokes Jobscience CEO Elliott, who says that word is verboten in hospital settings that might otherwise be virgin territory for Force.com apps.

Google’s main motive
Salesforce’s growing pains may have necessitated a broader platform play, but what about the PaaS offerings of such Internet giants as Google and Amazon?

“I’d be curious to know what Amazon’s motivation is, too,” says Tom Stocky, senior product manager for Google App Engine. “In the case of Google, it’s because we’re looking to move the Web forward as a platform.”

Despite Web services and SOA, entrepreneurial developers can be stymied by the high costs of developing Web applications capable of withstanding the scalability demands of success. “Even major companies have had to rearchitect six times in 10 years,” Stocky observes.

That’s where Google’s April preview release of App Engine can help. A tool for running Web applications on Google's infrastructure, the App Engine comes with a local development environment that makes short work of building a Web app. The programmer’s completed masterpiece enjoys dynamic Web serving, persistent storage (with the BigTable distributed data store), automatic scaling and load balancing, and a host of interesting Google APIs (for authentication, e-mail, maps, friend relationships and browser widgets).

“The experience for a developer is: They write an app in Python and upload it to our servers. There are limited resources, so they only get 5 million page views per month, as well as hard limits on CPU cycles and storage,” said Stocky. Offline processing is not currently allowed. And Google is urging developers to think carefully about scalability.

“It’s definitely important for developers to profile their apps—see how much CPU does this request take, which pages are having the most errors, which use the most resources. You have to look at the compute relationships between data-store entities. It’s certainly possible to write an app that does not scale,” Stocky cautions, mentioning concurrency contentions as a common tangle.

“With app engine, we tried to solve one part of the problem, which is scalability, but it’s not a silver bullet. And we focused on one particular use case: Web apps,” Stocky said. Those looking to crunch large computations may be better served elsewhere, he notes, suggesting that developers should evaluate all the available APIs and services before choosing one that makes the most sense for their applications.

Despite the popularity of App Engine (30,000 developers had signed up at press time, followed by a long wait list), “We were a little surprised because lots of blogs had taken a cynical ‘What’s the ulterior motive?’ tack. We have an explicit non-goal of lock-in. We want to make it easy for developers to get their data and code out.”

The PaaS paradigm
During the past decade, computer scientists have been hard pressed to name a technology trend as powerful as object-oriented programming or the Web. But the activity around platform as a service might just be signs of a great shift to the “serverless enterprise” touted by Appirio.

“Our company is almost a decade old, but it looks like PaaS might go faster than that first decade,” says Harris. “It takes a while to develop that trust.” But the movement marries many of the values of open source and standards-based collaboration, sparking interest in growing a broad marketplace, rather than cornering a small one. “There’s not going to be just one platform out there. You’re going to see integration not only with Google Apps but with new providers we don’t even know about yet,” Harris says.

Appirio’s Singh says, “I think we will look back in two years and say, ‘Wasn’t it evident where platform as a service was going?’ Google announces App Engine, and it’s clear Microsoft must respond. At that point, SAP, IBM and Oracle get in. We’ll see this wave of messaging and then development.” And, then, perhaps, a clearer definition of the word “platform.”

Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, SOA & SaaS

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