We watch the platform-as-a-service space closely here at ServicesAngle, but sometimes interesting use cases for PaaS can be hard to come by. That makes today’s announcement that SuccessFactors is using VMware’s open source PaaS system Cloud Foundry to enable its customers to extend its applications all the more interesting.

SuccessFactors is a software-as-a-service provider that offers employee-performance software and what it calls business execution software. Along with companies like Salesforce.com and Workday, it’s an enterprise SaaS success story.

According to a blog post on the Cloud Foundry site: “SuccessFactors chose Cloud Foundry for the flexibility and choice it provides their customers in development frameworks, applications services and clouds for deployment.”

Services Angle

Over the weekend GigaOM ran a guest post by Mike Jones of PaaS provider Outsystems. Jones argued that PaaS is “eating” SaaS. Jones makes the case that PaaS will overtake SaaS because SaaS requires extensive customization and in the end you don’t “own” the applications you’ve built your business around. He claims that SaaS has been popular because writing custom apps from scratch has historically been expensive and time consuming. He believes that as PaaS makes custom development faster and cheaper, PaaS will disrupt the SaaS model.

I’m not so sure this will happen. After all, PaaS can also make customizing SaaS applications faster and cheaper. SuccessFactors is the latest company follow the model that Salesforce.com pioneered with Force.com – mixing SaaS and PaaS. Even before Salesforce.com acquired Heroku, Force.com could be used to build standalone applications. However, apart from Heroku, Force.com is mostly a platform for building on-top of the Salesforce.com by extending existing SaaS applications, building integrations with other applications and services, etc. Oracle is jumping on this bandwagon by adding Groovy scripting to its Fusion Apps line, along with a full Java PaaS service. Then there’s companies like Podio (see our coverage) that blur the lines between SaaS and PaaS by creating hyper-customizable applications.

Instead of PaaS eating away at SaaS, I see the two models becoming increasingly intertwined as providers adopt Web-oriented architecture principles and RESTful APIs and services like Okta and SnapLogic make identity management and integration increasingly easier.