ITEXPO Special Report: Making Money with PaaS

There are two levels of cloud services that are pretty well understood. The easiest is Software as a Service (SaaS (News - Alert)), which is simply an application hosted in the cloud. This is really the top level of what could be considered a cloud services stack.

At the bottom is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which is raw server and storage infrastructure that you rent. Then you load up your own licensed software including operating systems, middleware and applications, and run it all from the cloud.

Stuck in the middle of the stack is Platform as a Service (PaaS). This is far more difficult to define, but may be the most valuable layer of all.

This week, ITEXPO (News - Alert) hosted a panel called “Monetizing the Cloud with PaaS,” aimed at teaching potential providers what PaaS is and how they can make money from it.

The panel included Unitas Global CEO Grant Kirkwood, Engine Yard Global Alliances & Business Development SVP Marcy Campbell, and Gurvinder Ahluwalia, CTO of Cloud Computing at IBM (News - Alert).

First the panel addressed just what a PaaS is. For many, PaaS is a cloud layer that hosts a development environment. This way, programmers don’t have to worry about updating their operating systems, IDEs and other tools. They just write software. And that is a main form of PaaS.

But PaaS can also be a platform to which one moves and runs software, says Unitas’ Kirkwood. Grant should know – this is one of the things his company does.

Engine Yard is on the development side. The company started offering services for Rails developers. It now allows multiple IDEs to plug into its PaaS. Amazon and Oracle (News - Alert) believe in the company so much they both invested money.

IBM, meanwhile, has its own PaaS that is can share with partners – IBM SmartCloud for applications. In fact, partnering was one of the main messages from Ahluwalia. Of course he thinks IBM is a great partner, but the main idea is a budding PaaS provider can figure out their angle or area of expertise and connect with partners to get all the pieces to build a PaaS. And with IBM, partners can find other partners to help them fill in the blanks, either technologically or geographically. That is the beauty of the IBM Partner Network.

The PaaS market is on the move and partners would be wise to consider tossing their hat in the ring. A recent finding by Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) shows that service providers will be increasing battling over PaaS, so if you want to play, getting in early is advised.