Suresh Sambandam

This is the first part of the multi-part series on "What is PaaS all about?" Let’s start by looking at the “Platform” story prior to Cloud. Enterprise IT did a lot of heavy lifting. They handcrafted the platform by combining various products such as App Servers, Web Servers, Databases, Middleware, Integration Servers, Portal Servers, and Workflow Engines. Not only did Enterprises IT create a unique combination for them, they also ended up redundantly deploying it for various projects within the enterprise. There was no common or central runtime platform, although they always intended to create one. In most cases, it was an approach or a blueprint. A runtime platform was constructed every time. as per the blueprint. for every project. Looking back it sounds draconian but that’s what everyone did happily and some of them continue to it  today – not realizing that’s exa... (more)

Demystifying the PaaS Landscape

Every other day there is a new cloud product / platform announcement. Not just startups, even the mega ISVs are jumping onto the cloud bandwagon. Oracle's Larry Ellison first said cloud is all crap and then announces ‘Cloud-in-a-box,' sort of an oxymoron, and in this year's OOW Oracle made a flamboyant announcement - this is just one of the more popular samples. The platform-as-a-service landscape is muddied every day as more vendors are cloud washing their offerings. With all this, I thought it would be a good attempt to demystify different platform categories in the cloud with... (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)

India Cloud and SaaS Opportunity

Cloud the way forward in India - the 4th wave of the IT Industry 1. First, this is a fantastic effort from Zinnov for bringing an India perspective for ‘Cloud'. Full Credits to Pari Natarajan, Chandramouli, Anand Tatambhotla and the team behind this effort. 2. Second, we weren't even aware that OrangeScape was part of this report. I remember talking to these folks 9 months ago or something, and I do run into them in panel discussions in cloud conferences but never knew that we are going to be featured. Looks like they have been tracking OrangeScape and thanks a ton for the refere... (more)