Don’t Forget the End User When Discussing PaaS!


I finally had a chance to sit down and read a McKinsey report titled “The Emerging Platform Wars” that was a good and lengthy treatise on SaaS and the emergence of PaaS offerings to solve all that ails software companies.

The report did a good job at breaking down PaaS archetypes, value propositions, etc. but one thing notable missing was what impact PaaS based offerings have on SaaS consumers (end user). Building on a PaaS offering is by far the best approach for an ISV, but it also has significant impact on end user experience.

End users benefit from centralized application management, shared data and collaborative aspects offered by the platform, and even things like single-sign on across vendors. There are many, many more value propositions coming from PaaS for end users; it would be interesting to break these down and compare end users using PaaS based offerings on the same platform instance and what value they can derive vs usage of non PaaS-based offerings.

Are there any immediately apparant value propositions owned by the end user when they consume PaaS-based SaaS offerings?

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May 29th, 2008
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Yves Hiernaux
Posted on:
May 30, 2008 at 12:04 am

Hello Sinclair,

I would say it depends which kind of platform you are considering.

PaaS could mean technical integration solving technical redundancies such as single login screen for several solutions, … But it could also mean complete integration in terms of look & feel, naviguation, …

My opinion is that users will ultimatly benefit from a platform if that one is answering different business needs in a coherent and uniform environment.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Sunil
Posted on:
May 30, 2008 at 5:47 pm

Hi,
why would a vendor submit themselves to such a high lockin with a PaaS solution ? This is especially so for large ISV.

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Sinclair Schuller
Posted on:
May 31, 2008 at 12:40 am

Hi Sunil,

Good question. First, we need to recognize that PaaS offerings vary greatly in levels of lockin. Generally, lockin is higher when there is significant deviation from what is generally accepted by those in the industry (e.g. lock-in is very high when a new language is introduced whose execution scope is isolated to the PaaS that owns the language). Given that, there isn’t a correlation between using a PaaS offering and some dire lock-in scenario.

Second, given what I’ve described, there is always some degree of lockin using PaaS. The question becomes whether the lock-in risk is significantly outweighed by the large value delivered by PaaS concepts. PaaS based solutions will generally experience huge savings in time to market, project costs, maintenance costs etc.

A good analogy is the operating system. Could you write software that is started at boot with a PC so that you don’t experience OS lockin? Sure, but then you spend enormous amount of time writing drivers and hardware communication, and lose out on the abstraction the OS created. Clearly, this is a purposefully trivial example but it makes the point that a layer like a PaaS offering can be extremely beneficial to those writing apps.