PaaS gives developers a virtual toolbox

With creative, customized applications, these entrepreneurial users are building their own SaaS systems

By Julia King
Computerworld
March 23, 2009

Just when you thought you had a grip on your techie acronyms, along comes another one that experts predict spells the future of software development. The good news is that this one has the potential to build new business opportunities, too.

Platform as a service, or PaaS, is essentially a virtual tool bag with all the high-tech gadgetry you need to build, test and deploy custom software for every imaginable application. Rather than buying and installing application building blocks on their own hardware, PaaS users tap into Web-based integrated development environments such as .Net or Java to quickly build exactly what they want. And in some cases, they in turn sell what they build or outsource it to other companies.

"Think of PaaS as a sandbox where you can build an application that, once built, you can also run on the same [Web-based] platform," says Kevin Weiss, CEO of Author Solutions Inc., a $100 million publishing company that tapped PaaS to build what he calls "a full-scale publishing ERP system" in a span of just four months.

"PaaS is where and how you build the application; SaaS is what you've got when you're done with it," Weiss explains.

The company hired Appirio Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based systems integrator, to develop its Gemini custom-publishing system on Force.com, Salesforce.com Inc.'s PaaS offering. Author Solutions uses the Gemini software to track all content, including the millions of edits it makes to the thousands of manuscripts it publishes each year.

"Gemini includes content management and an extensive workflow system with an enormous number of triggers along the way because there's a lot of tracking back and forth between authors and our publishing experts," Weiss explains.

The system, which has been up and running for almost a year, has allowed Author Solutions to execute its own business plans much faster and more cheaply, and to take on outsourced work from other companies -- thus generating new revenue.

Some of the company's outsourcing customers want to track the workflow of their manuscripts differently. "But this is pretty easy to do on the Force.com side, because you can go in and move triggers around and reconfigure an application to do what you want, rather than write hundreds or thousands of lines of code" to make a change, Weiss notes. "As we bring on more services and partners, we just make a copy of what we've done and make a few changes based on what our partner needs, and we're ready to go. The cost differential is an order of magnitude different for us," another big benefit of using PaaS, he says.

According to Jeffrey M. Kaplan, a SaaS analyst at consulting firm ThinkStrategies, PaaS offers more than an opportunity for users to cut software development costs. "The functionality allows companies to generate new business opportunities for themselves," he says.

"With PaaS, you can build or customize your own applications very quickly and then run them on the platform," says Appirio CEO Chris Barbin. Appirio, for example, has built its own software license management and human resources applications, which it runs in the cloud. Other software developers can build applications and add them to various PaaS ecosystems, where they can be licensed by other Web-based users. 

Hidden Market
"We were initially thinking of our customers as companies that are already software vendors who want to offer SaaS," says Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer at PaaS start-up Savvis Inc. "But there's no reason that it has to be a previous software vendor." User companies are also welcome. In fact, Savvis has created a Web-based sandbox "where any customer can drop their software and see if it could be virtualized, and test whether or not to proceed with a hosted version," he says.

Doerr says PaaS and SaaS "offer a new way to capitalize on intellectual property and are lighter-weight in terms of investment costs."
That is what drew Paul Minor, CEO of Digicontractor Corp. in Tarzana, Calif., to Corent Technology Inc. A former real estate developer, Minor had an idea for Web-based software that would allow users to derive physical dimensions and exact measurements from any digital image. For example, engineers and contractors can upload digital photos to obtain precise measurements of land parcels. "We also have some unique applications, ranging from nuclear power facilities that want to measure the dimension of rods in reactors to scientists who want to measure whales in the ocean as a way to determine the health of the food chain," Minor says. Looking ahead, the company is aiming to set up kiosks in big-box home stores like Home Depot and Lowes.

Digicontractor explored the option of developing the software in-house and hiring it out to a traditional software-development firm but determined it would be too expensive, especially for a start-up, Minor says. What Corent offered is "a turnkey process," he says. "We were able to have our core application up and running in three months, and now we can do our own software changes without having to hire a developer." Digicontractor has also licensed its uPhotoMeasure software to HomeTips.com, which is running the application under a SaaS model on its Web site.

Getting software up and running fast and on the cheap is appealing to all companies, especially in this brutal economy. That's one reason why early adopters and analysts alike predict that the PaaS market will become large very quickly.

"I think you're going to see more people move to this platform," says Author Solutions' Weiss. "Right now, it's a sweet spot for companies my size -- in the $100 million range -- but I don't see any reason why a large enterprise wouldn't think about putting pieces of their application portfolio on a PaaS exchange, especially applications you want to put up real fast and test out." Bottom line, he says: "I don't see this as a pure small and medium-sized business play."