PaaS vendors have more experience than traditional IT vendors

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“We probably have deployed and scaled more Ruby apps than anyone on the planet,” said John Dillon, CEO, Engine Yard. “So developers come to us. We know best.”

But traditional IT vendors have taken notice, and now Oracle, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others say they’re building or have recently launched PaaS offerings, and in some cases infrastructure services. They join Microsoft, which already offers a PaaS service with Azure. These large IT providers may be attractive to businesses that have long relationships with them.

The independent PaaS providers seem to hope that their experience and the size of the market, combined with conflicting interests on the part of some big IT vendors, will keep them in business.

“You have to be about PaaS,”

Traditional enterprise vendors want first and foremost to preserve their existing businesses, and the result may be services that don’t fit the needs of developers, Dillon argued. Those who decide to offer robust services may do so to the detriment of sales of existing on-premise products, putting a strain on their businesses. “There will be some big winners and losers at the big IT vendors,” he said.

Others agreed. “If you’re going to do a PaaS you have to be about PaaS,” Hykes said. But the bigger companies have other priorities. “Look at Microsoft or Google. Google is not about helping developers create software. It’s not why they were created,” he said. Google offers a platform service through its App Engine.

Meanwhile, independent providers recognise they must increase their scale to compete. “This is a big company game,” said Isaac Roth, PaaS master at Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS service. “I don’t think you can win as a little company.”

While smaller providers have largely figured out how to architect their services, operations takes skill and money. “Operating PaaS at scale and [at] the price points being set is incredibly difficult, and it takes an unbelievable amount of resources,” he said.

As an example, Roth said he has a five person team just to handle security, and his service does not even have the kinds of certifications that Amazon, the largest IaaS provider, has. In addition, operating such services requires kernel engineers, Java virtual machine engineers, people who can optimise storage, and many other types of skilled workers.

He expects that the traditional IT vendors just getting into the market will be able to buy their way in by purchasing small operators, or quickly build the technology they need internally.

Big IT vendors have the engineering resources for that type of work. HP, for instance, already has 70 or 80 people just working on contributions to the OpenStack cloud platform, said Patrick Scaglia, HP vice president and CTO of cloud services and applications.

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