Wikibon analyst Brian Gracely

If you’re wondering what platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is and whether you should worry about it, Brian Gracely says you’re already behind the curve. Gracely, who began contributing to the Wikibon community last month after a long and successful career at multiple vendors and cloud providers, thinks software development will need to become a core competency for every business as cloud-based disruptors attack from every direction.

CIOs need to come out of 2015 with a clear understanding not only of what platforms are but how their organizations plan to adopt it, he says, because rapid software development will define the next stage of competition.

That’s because the competitive playing field is shifting. “In the 1980s and 1990s, ERP and supply-chain were the platforms that defined successful companies,” Gracely asserts in Cloud Native Application Platforms – Structured and Unstructured, a new research brief on Wikibon Premium. “In the 2000s, websites and online ordering platforms allowed companies to compete globally and 24x7x365. Going forward, the ability to create new applications and adapt to rapidly changing economics will define the winners and losers.”

PaaS is essentially a platform for developing applications in the cloud. Broadly speaking, PaaS provides the tools for both building software and managing infrastructure, but there are many nuances depending on the underlying platforms and degree of control that’s required.

Fork in the road

Early PaaS platforms struggled with complexity, functionality gaps and lack of coverage, but the market is rapidly maturing. Gracely now sees it forking along two paths: structured and unstructured platforms.

Unstructured PaaS is principally the domain of the new breed of cloud-native companies that are building completely new applications. Uber, Inc., Airbnb, Inc. Netflix, Inc. and Pinterest, Inc. are some of the most notable recent examples. These companies couldn’t buy the software with the scale and speed they needed, so they had to build them from scratch. “Netflix had more users than anyone on the planet had ever had, so they had to build things nobody had ever built,” Gracely said in an interview with SiliconAngle.

Many companies don’t want to take on the cost and complexity of building highly customized cloud platforms, however. Structured PaaS has sprung up to provide those firms with more packaged functionality in exchange for somewhat less control. For example, application-awareness, service brokers and logging/monitoring may be built into a structured PaaS platform to reduce complexity and speed deployment. Amazon Web Services has been focused on this market with recent toolkits that cover functions like mobile services and relational transactions.

“For enterprise, government, midmarket and service providers, structured platforms can get them going faster and stay competitive,” he said.

There’s no one right PaaS choice for every company, but CIOs need to understand the options, because disruption may be just around the corner. “If you’re in any major industry right now, there is a startup with a low barrier to entry that’s looking to disrupt you, particularly if you make healthy margins,” he said. “There are probably multiple people in your industry who will be trying to beat you with technology in the next 12-18 months.”

These competitors will almost invariably use cloud platforms developed with unstructured PaaS, and they will emerge very quickly. Structured PaaS tools can enable market incumbents to quickly build defensive positions without having to invest heavily in new skills and training.

Gracely recommends a few factors CIOs should consider in formulating a PaaS strategy. Be sure the platform supports the languages and skills you already have in house. Understand the investments you have to make to become proficient and avoid getting locked into a platform that doesn’t have broad industry support. Cloud Foundry is rapidly gaining traction and the new Docker ecosystem is showing signs of developing into a full-fledged PaaS platform of its own.

But start now, he writes on Wikibon. “Companies that have not begun the process of evaluating or deploying a platform will quickly find themselves behind their industry peers that are better leveraging software as a core business differentiator.”

Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman introduced Brian Gracely on CUBEconversations (9:32)

Photo by Daniel Olnes via Flickr Creative Commons