Platform as a service is mostly for software developers. But by making it easier to create programs, PaaS promises more choices and higher-quality business applications for all kinds of companies.
Terry Gensler, managing director of Art Window Coverings, was stuck. His 50-person window treatment company, based in Cleveland, needed a way to quickly enter orders and create quotes and estimates, but simply couldn't afford to buy and customize an off-the-shelf software package. But with the help of a new technology trend known as platform as a service (PaaS), Gensler was able to get exactly the order-entry software he needed.
By now, everyone knows the value of software as a service (SaaS) to small and midsize companies. But eventually, PaaS could have an even more profound effect on growing companies' access to the applications they need. Platform as a service is a technique that makes it faster, easier, and cheaper to develop and deploy custom SaaS applications using existing components. That means that smaller companies -- like Art Window Coverings -- can get exactly the applications they need, without having to spend big bucks to develop them from scratch.
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So exactly what is PaaS? According to Wikipedia: "The PaaS model makes all of the facilities required to support the end-to-end life cycle of building and delivering Web applications and services entirely available from the Internet -- with no software downloads or installation for developers, IT managers, or end-users." PaaS may also include workflow for "application design, development, testing, deployment, and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, Web service integration, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, state management, application versioning, application instrumentation, and developer community facilitation."
James Talbot at PaaS vendor Bungee Labs explains the benefits more clearly: "PaaS enables more developers to get ideas into real applications sooner and cheaper. That leads to more choice and higher-quality applications" for small and midsize companies.
Vertical Market Magic
For Art Window Coverings, a subsidiary of Caldwell's Window Ware in Pittsburgh, PaaS made all the difference. Gensler says the company uses its PaaS database application for order entry for customized products. "We price it ourselves," he adds, but the app "stores all the customized data and matches it up with pricing so we can send out estimates and quotes right from there. We can add custom products and vendors on the fly."
With off-the-shelf software, Gensler says, "we would have had to do the customization ourselves. We don't have that capability." Instead, "we described what we needed to [developers MCF Technology Solutions], and they [initially] came back with something that didn't do exactly everything we wanted. But they quickly updated it in an iterative development process." Eventually, he adds, "it met our needs exactly."
MCF's Govind Davis says that's the point of PaaS: "We are able to give them a solution that fits their needs." Davis explains that for most growing companies, "what they need is an immediate solution, the ability to produce a quote for a client in three minutes and be sure the bottom line will work. They don't need all the bells and whistles in packaged software.
"We sell the SaaS concept," Davis says, "but PaaS means that we don't have to sell them the standard package. They think it's really cool, that we just built it from scratch, but in reality, there are really only so many business process solutions out there. It's a huge selling point for us."
Next Page: Carving Out A PaaS Ecosystem
