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PaaS is still a very nascent market, so if the business case doesn’t make sense this year, it may be worth
another look next year to allow the technology and vendor offerings to mature.
o SaaS vendors. A PaaS offering such as Salesforce.com’s Force.com, extends the platform used by
the SaaS vendor to additional tenants. The developer uses the vendor’s tools and frameworks to
create their own applications.
o Enterprise application PaaS provides enterprise-familiar languages and frameworks. For example,
Windows Azure supports .NET while VMforce uses Java and the open source Spring framework.
o Services for a platform. Services for developers offered by Infrastructure as a Service providers –
for example, Amazon EC2 – are more services for a platform rather than platform as a service.
Developers must still install their own programming framework and tools on the servers.
A good resource for general information on the economics of PaaS is LongJump’s white paper “PaaS-
onomics” which provides information on lowering costs and increasing the business value of IT via PaaS.
Also, be sure to use the Info-Tech “Cloud TCO Comparison Tool” and “PaaS Appropriateness Assessment
Tool”.
Each section contains a description of what is intended to be delivered as well as example ideas in italics.
Remember to delete this grey text in the final document.
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Table of Contents
Executive Summary 3
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Executive Summary
The Executive Summary will be written after all other sections have been completed. It may be the only section an
executive reads or its content and tone may determine whether the rest of the plan is read at all.
Summarize each section into a concise set of statements and conclusions. Try to hook the reader so that they want
to read each section in its entirety. Make sure that the project being proposed is clearly identified as a call to action
at the end, intended to exploit the opportunities that have been strategized. End with a clear statement of what is
needed from the reader to make it happen.
Example:
The strategic goal of application development should be to effectively meet business needs through rapid and
efficient development and deployment of applications that serve the business. The end user is also a critical
consideration for this strategy: to ensure that applications are being delivered on time, function in a meaningful and
productive way, and can be rapidly improved based on feedback. Platform as a Service will allow us to achieve
these goals more effectively and at a lower cost.
The infrastructure cost savings potential of the cloud needs to be considered for our application
development strategy. Rapid and flexible application development via PaaS could be critical to enabling an
agile development strategy which allows us to focus on business logic and application improvement.
A PaaS strategy will also assist in lowering the cost of our agility goals and the cost of future growth and
new initiatives.
Opportunities presented by cloud-based development include CapEx reduction, increased IT efficiency due
to lower administrative overhead, a moderate decrease in facilities costs, and more consistent quality
across applications for all users.
Potential challenges for a PaaS approach include vendor lock-in, integration, and loss of developer control
and flexibility that may impact morale. However, plans to mitigate these challenges have been developed.
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Define how a PaaS strategy relates to lowering costs and improving efficiency. The point here is to show
that the cloud relates to an agile development strategy which has real business benefit.
If possible, describe past efforts that have been accomplished to advance the goal of PaaS adoption. For
example, list other cloud services being leveraged – Software as a Service – that would improve resource
consistency.
Provide evidence of general market trends to indicate that others are pursuing similar goals.
Text can be drawn from Info-Tech’s PaaS strategy storyboard to help make the case. For example:
The goal of [company name] is to continue to drive toward an agile development strategy in order to efficiently and
cost-effectively support mission-critical business applications. PaaS can break the bottleneck of infrastructure
acquisition configuration and deployment for development projects.
• Physical infrastructure requirements for application development include Web servers, application servers,
and database servers. This infrastructure costs time, capital, and administrative overhead.
• In a PaaS scenario the development team can focus on the business logic of developing an
application. The infrastructure to host and run the solution is simply there and will automatically scale with
need.
• With PaaS, an application goes rapidly from modeling to coding to push button deployment. This is ideal
for a rapid develop and deploy strategy. Changes and additions to the application gleaned from user
feedback and usage statistics can be quickly and automatically deployed to the end user.
n = 123
Source: Info-Tech Research Group
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• Both within IT and in the business as a whole, the potential the cloud offers to lower infrastructure costs,
particularly upfront costs, is seen as the most positive attribute.
• Second only to infrastructure costs, rapid and flexible application development and delivery was ranked as
positive.
• An agile development approach using PaaS and cloud application delivery promotes iterative development,
push button delivery, automated user management and taking infrastructure provisioning and management
off the table to allow for rapid deployment with no upfront infrastructure costs.
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Example:
Problem Details/Description
The idea behind agile development is to deliver more narrowly scoped pieces
of functionality more rapidly. It is an iterative process with a tight feedback loop.
As each small application is deployed, feedback and use statistics are gathered
to improve service and functionality of the next iteration.
Inability to affordably support
an agile development strategy.
It has become a challenge to support this agility without having to spend more
capital on required resources: more servers, more development tools, etc. It is
taking longer to gain approval to roll out necessary changes to our users which
impacts the performance and productivity of the applications we support.
Problem 3
Problem 4
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Legend
Our organization will likely not benefit from investing resources into this area.
Domain 6
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Integration with existing data sources will be a Again, using Salesforce, integration
Data integration between challenge, particularly if the data is hosted on the Force.com platform mitigates
applications and services internally and the application is being this challenge.
developed and hosted in the cloud.
Many developers want to have access to the This can be mitigated by establishing
entire development environment, from the working expectations around
application down to the bare metal. They are processes and methodologies.
Loss of control of
accountable for the functionality of the
ownership
performance of the entire stack, so they want
to be involved in building out the components
and architecture
Challenge 5
Challenge 6
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