Service Providers Should Shift to PaaS

Service providers can shift to the cloud with PaaS

With the advent of digital business operations, service providers—independent software vendors in particular—are an asset to enterprises adapting to fundamental operational changes.

As enterprises transform into digital businesses, service providers are poised to become an essential asset to these organizations.

Independent software vendors in particular need to be aware of the potential for new business wrought by this fundamental transformation of business structures. They may find it necessary to realign and adapt their own businesses to keep pace with such changes. Vendors can also retain existing customers by differentiating their products and services, showing clients their added value to the enterprise.

Gartner analysts contend that service providers—including platform as a service vendors—will need to examine several aspects of their operations in order to thrive in this evolving environment. These include the service provider’s:

• Organizational structure
• Capabilities
• Offerings
• Engagement models
• Delivery models

Allie Young, a Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, points out the opportunities: "Service providers can help organizations with the innovation and industrialization required to transform into digital businesses over the coming decade."

Independent software vendors can play a key role by helping organizations create and retool the technologies they use. They can help their clients remain relevant and competitive during a company-wide transition to a digital business environment, says Susan Tan, research vice president at Gartner.

As businesses’ adoption of transformative digital technologies accelerates, platform-as-a-service providers must adapt to meet these new demands. betanews' Vivek Vahie explains the compelling value of PaaS:

"What developers gain with PaaS is a framework they can build upon to develop or customize applications. PaaS makes the development, testing, and deployment of applications quick, simple, and cost-effective. With this technology, enterprise operations, or third party providers, can manage operating systems, virtualization, servers, storage, networking, and the PaaS software itself. Developers, however, manage the applications."

Shifting to PaaS

The shift to PaaS can prove difficult for established independent software vendors, and it can also be risky.

One of the most obvious moves possible for independent software vendors is to migrate into the cloud, which is not without its own lengthy checklist of challenges to tackle. It is, note some professionals who were around at the time, not unlike the situation vendors encountered in the 1990s with the transition to Web-based services and applications.

Successful independent software vendors may prove to be those with an application capable of solving a particular problem for clients. Whether that fix is a cloud or mobile application is moot in today’s market. New-to-the-market independent software vendors are focusing on niche application offerings—and rightly so, say industry observers.

Adapting also means examining how applications are delivered and maintained. The move is toward cloud and virtual environments, which means users are interested in software-as-a-service applications.

It also means some established software vendors and developers are finding adaptation difficult.

The savvy independent software vendors will be certain their software delivers the functionality promised and be able to remain flexible. Applications must be able to be deployed on any platform available, whether it’s private or on premises.

Vendors have to retain their existing customer base to remain competitive. To do so requires an ongoing dialogue with those valued customers.

What challenges are facing your business? What benefits might it reap from using platform as a service?

Image by Mathias Rosenthal, 123RF