The Rise of PaaS

After Software as a Service (SaaS) we are now slowly entering the domain of Platform as a Service (PaaS). As the Internet speeds pickup and our hardware increasingly becomes more powerful, there is little to stop this transition. With enough competition in the domain it would possibly present benefits to a lot of people from a business point of view at both ends of the spectrum.

The possible apprehensions that a business may face while adopting PaaS include:

1. Security: Keeping proprietary code on alien servers may be hard to stomach for many businesses, with a constant fear about data-theft and data-loss. This is always going to be top-priority
2. Speed: Technically proficient companies may feel that they are ceding control of the speed of application as they would no longer control many things in the server, database and application development. For majority business owners, though, this may not be as big a consideration.
3. Portability: This would be another major issue. With their experience with computing over the last so many years, business owners in general would hate to tie down themselves with any PaaS provider. This means PaaS provider would have to either leverage some existing and popular framework or invent and popularize an entirely new one. Both challenges are not for the faint-hearted!

With respect to development of Rich Internet Applications, this would only further complicate the equation in this nascent field. Tie-ups, support, marketing and smart technical development is the way ahead, I guess. The big horses to watch include Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, HP and SalesForce. I am sure many others would try as well. I feel that the dominant advantage would lie not primarily with better technology but with better marketing and reach as the product will increasingly get commoditized. Lets see.