Paas-Onomics: TH E On-Demand Enterprise Applications Platform

The On-Demand Enterprise
Applications Platform
PaaS-onomics
A CIO’s Guide to using Platform-as-a-Service to Lower Costs of
Application Initiatives While Improving the Business Value of IT
According to Goldman Sachs in their July 2008 IT an organization. Both these factors should have CIOs
Sales Opportunity survey of 100 CIOs, less than 2% taking a closer look at PaaS not only for its economic
of them said cloud computing was a priority. In fact, benefits, but as an opportunity to improve information
it was ranked last in a series of initiatives. In an in- management and processes across the enterprise.
creasingly competitive business environment and the PaaS can add significant value to enterprise IT by
emergence of cloud computing and its offshoot, plat- enabling IT to better serve the business, operate at a
form-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, these CIOs seem strategic level with business divisions and rapidly de-
to be missing a bigger picture. liver application solutions to business partners.
That’s because PaaS offers businesses a very de-
monstrable ROI while also strengthening operations
Platform at Your Service™

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PaaS-onomics: A CIO’s Guide to Platform-as-a-Service
Long Tail of IT Projects

Every CIO faces the need to maximize their budget grown databases and even custom software develop-
to support as many business-positive projects as pos- ment, all beyond the oversight, control and expertise
sible. In fact, many CIOs today have built multiple of IT.
budgets based on contingencies around the business The departmental distraction, network traffic and
climate, sudden new challenges, and updating technol- cost to manage and maintain those solutions or to en-
ogy. And every CIO has an IT backlog – the long tail of sure they have the right security and access control can
IT - a set of projects that are important and impactful be significant and should be under the purview of Cor-
to different divisions of the business but maybe can’t porate IT.
be realized because of resource constraints, money, or Long tail projects can become a hindrance to busi-
where the level of project complexity requires too much ness growth. After all, a company is only as strong as
time to complete or specialized talent. its weakest point. Businesses that have broken produc-
Rightly so, the core enterprise applications that jus- tivity areas collect a sea of missed opportunities to im-
tify big IT spending are mission critical to the company prove corporate performance, competitive position, IT
and should be top of mind for the CIO, but those back- governance, or increased revenues. In most cases, these
burning projects are still – well – burning. Over time, departmental solutions could have been quickly devel-
those long tail applications take a toll operationally oped and delivered by IT if there was corporate adop-
and on general productivity. And business constituents tion of a central application platform. Of course, IT is
come to rely more and more on their own makeshift so- busy keeping the lights on, but wouldn’t it be better for
lutions, including large, complex spreadsheets, home- the business to not need so many different lights.
Buy Build SaaS Mash & PaaS Office Productivity

Mashed up application Power users hacking on
development on spreadsheets, etc.
hosted platforms.
Projects that Projects that

justify big don’t justify big
IT spend IT spend Piles of unserved demand
2
LongJump - The On-Demand Enterprise Applications Platform
The Birth of a Silo The IT application portfolio gets thicker with more
To understand how IT has gotten to where it is today, vendors, more off-the-shelf software and an increasing
we need to examine how new applications are intro- number of sub-projects. Applications take on a life of
duced. their own, which is why entire suites of solutions are
Traditionally, IT would have to purchase physical geared towards application lifecycle management.
hardware and then deploy some type of application Let’s also consider that features that are developed in
infrastructure. That includes web servers, application these silos often cannot be leveraged into other applica-
servers, databases, creating application frameworks, tions. They are disconnected and separate. This drives
etc. Of course, that means someone has to manage each the cost of maintenance sky high and results in unpre-
of those layers. Scalability, data recovery and security dictable IT spending whenever that application needs
issues also come into play. In many cases, much of the to be updated.
resource time and costs involved in building occur be- Ultimately, the application becomes its own silo and
fore the application has ever been defined. development teams have to reinvent the wheel for every
Then application architects are tasked with: new business problem or application function. Over
• Requirements gathering time, multiple silos start appearing and management of
• Creating data models these fragmented applications becomes more complex
• Designing user interfaces and expensive.
• Mapping out workflows and processes Moving Beyond the Reactive

• Building connectors to external systems The application management maturity of an IT or-
Invariably, the endeavor involves essentially develop- ganization depends on their ability to repeat, reuse
ing, quality assuring and releasing a complete software and repurpose technologies. According to John E. Van
product. This internal product comes burdened with a Decker of Gartner, there are five levels of the Applica-
list of technical, business and review requirements, a tion Maturity:
series of development cycles, and a complete applica- • Level 1 — Ad Hoc: Every time an activity is
tion infrastructure that is specific for that one type of performed, the team creates a new process.
operation. It also needs to have some method for con- • Level 2 — Repeatable: Individual teams
necting to existing systems. establish and use processes, but the processes
In the process of pulling together even simple ap- are not shared across the application
plications, developers will have to find ways to build organization and there is little consistency.
or buy application components for security access con- • Level 3 — Defined: The application
trols, user authentication, data view management, re- organization defines and consistently uses a
ports and dashboards, custom processing, and much shared set of documented processes.
more. Businesses often bring in independent contrac- • Level 4 — Quantitatively Managed: Process
tors or services companies or platform specialists. definitions are extended to produce or identify
metrics that indicate process effectiveness.

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The On-Demand Enterprise

Platform at Your Service™

Long Tail of IT Projects

sible. In fact, many CIOs today have built multiple of IT.

to different divisions of the business but maybe can’t porate IT.

Buy Build SaaS Mash & PaaS Office Productivity

Projects that Projects that

duced. their own, which is why entire suites of solutions are

• Requirements gathering time, multiple silos start appearing and management of

• Creating data models these fragmented applications becomes more complex

• Designing user interfaces and expensive.

• Mapping out workflows and processes Moving Beyond the Reactive

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