Suresh Sambandam

The PaaS market is filled with noise. "Platform as a Service" is surrounded with blind men around the elephant, each with their own definition PaaS. This is further compounded by the fact that the Application Platforms landscape is changing quickly as well. We keep hearing that "Developers" want control of the code, access to the nuts and bolts of the service they intend to consume. The same "Developers" seem to be adopting PaaS because of the tremendous speed and scale advantage. And the same "Developers" seem to be clamoring over the security and architectural compliance matters. There's even talk of developer cloud mutiny! There are use cases that are simplified to the usage of a Private PaaS, but that's only addressing the matter from a hosting and Data Control standpoint, beyond which the concern should be how the Platform Stack is built and provided to the dev... (more)

Shouldn't PaaS for Enterprises Be More than DevOps?

This is Part 2 in my series on the topic of PaaS (Platform as a Service) and in this post I cover why PaaS for enterprises is more than just DevOps and a larger "technology convergence" in the core "Software Engineering" area is leading this perfect storm called PaaS. The first part is: What is PaaS all about? - Part 1: It's about Abstraction Before I go deep into this topic, I want to clarify "technology convergence" from "programming environment optimization" primarily in the context of this post. The programming environment optimization is more commonly referred as "DevOps". ... (more)

Why Old ERP Wine Can't Be Bottled in SaaS

There is a fundamental shift that is happening to ‘enterprise apps' in the SaaS world when compared to the On-premise ERP world. I tried to google for ERP vs SaaS and found articles like these: SaaS vs Traditional ERP : 5 Key Differentiators(http://it.toolbox.com) A Tale of Two Software Worlds: Old ERP vs. SaaS(http://www.zdnet.com) Impact of SaaS on the enterprise ERP market(http://www.infoworld.com) While, there is nothing wrong with these articles - I wasn't able to find one that addressed what I feel is a much more fundamental shift in the way the SaaS applications are / will ... (more)

When to PaaS Instead of SaaS or IaaS

It can be argued that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) have been sufficiently commoditized so as to neutralize any "breakthrough" competitive advantage they might originally have presented. In simple terms, once everybody's doing it, you have to do it just to keep pace. If only one bank had Automated Teller Machines, that bank would have a big advantage. Today, things like ATM's and online banking are commodity offerings. Without them, a bank could not stay in business. We're rapidly getting to the point where the same can be said for enterprise... (more)

Clearing the Confusion Around "Private Cloud"

I was on a LinkedIn thread titled ‘How cloud computing is different from SaaS‘ where Rick Chapman who runs SoftLetter and SaaS University went on beating on this question ‘What is a private cloud’? It is definitely worth it given the tremendous amount of confusion in the term ‘Cloud’ in general and ‘Private Cloud’ in particular. The motivation for this post is Rick and supported by a tweet I read around the same time from ‘Carl Brooks‘ who is a technology writer on Cloud at TechTarget. Let me give it a shot. First, Cloud is about leveraging economies of scale whether it is public o... (more)