Large organizations are buying into PaaS cloud services
Cloud is often seen as the way to go for small companies with few IT resources. However, the middleware and development layer of cloud -- Platform as a Service -- is becoming a hot commodity for large organizations as well.
That's the word from Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees. In a recent article in VentureBeat, he observes that as with cloud in general, "there is a myth out there that PaaS is mainly for startups or small companies because big enterprises prefer to maintain more control over their development environments and can’t use PaaS. That’s not true."
In a recent survey of 262 enterprises I helped conduct as part of my work with Unisphere Research (and sponsored by Oracle), we found that PaaS is now prevalent among one-fifth of public cloud adopters and half of private cloud sites. Among oublic cloud adopters, PaaS adoption has jumped from 18% to 20% since 2010. This is much higher for harger organizations in the survey -- those with 5,000 or more employees -- with 31% report adopting PaaS.
Among private cloud adopters, PaaS adoption has almost doubled from 2010 -- from 36% to 51%. The adoption rate for private cloud-based PaaS is 53% among the larger organizations.
In his article, Labourey provides examples of companies signing onto PaaS to handle development, testing and inetgration within their organizations, including Groupe Adeo, the fourth largest Do-It-Yourself (DIY) retailer in the world, which employed PaaS to develop an e-commerce application, enabling collaboration among teams in France, India and Belgium.
A few months back, I spoke with Jay Snyder, director of platform engineering at Aetna, one of the nation's largest health insurers, about his company's private cloud, which hosts development tools and platforms for the the company's large contingent of developers. The advantage the private cloud brings here is that it supports contstantly updated virtualized workstations which provides developers immediate access to their desktops, along with almost unlimited memory and capacity to build and test applications.
Also, as was just reported here at this blogsite, Panasonic's car stereo division now employs a PaaS architecture to enable developers across the globe to work in sync, as well as increase software turnaround time.