PaaSTime: seeking the Golden Snitch* that is Platform as a Service

[dturchin]

Before birds were angry or farms were villed, Steve Wiebe was playing Kong in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire. All the time. Steve was a gamer before they were called that. He anticipated what's now a $75 billion market when it was a few dudes in pizza parlor basements making gorillas climb ladders one quarter at a time.

There's a new breed of geek-savant Steve Wiebes out there today pioneering a new fringe diversion that will soon change the world: they're PaaS developers and the good ones are about to have their careers launched into orbit. I'll be sharing their stories here.

I'll also use this space to track a (mostly) objective indicator of enterprise PaaS adoption. As the primordial ooze that is today's cloud app dev market takes shape, it seems necessary to quantify progress - lest we might believe our own hype. We'll call it the Index of PaaS Activity ("IPA" for short, not to be confused with the similarly-named desi brew).

I'll explain the algorithm behind it in a subsequent post. For now, suffice it to say it's based on a set of neutral, quantifiable metrics like stock prices, search results, job postings, and social media activity. We'll inaugurate the index this month with a score of 100. And no, you can't purchase IPA futures contracts on SharesPost (yet).

The first customer story comes from a cloud services provider in England where two enterprising techs replaced an annual million-euro systems integration and software budget with apps that automate the request process for computing resources. Their company's in the business of provisioning and managing virtual machines for small businesses and yet they were consistently missing a seven (!) day SLA for new activations and upgrades.

They realized that forms and workflow living in proprietary systems could be replaced and managed better on a ServiceNow backend. In the process, they shook up a stodgy culture that had become accustomed to writing checks for bad software. Oh, and they became heroes.

Here's how it went down: Reggie and Lane, seasoned IT guys and novice developers, were asked to fix a process issue that was causing ops to miss the SLA which led to plummeting sat scores and customer defections. Fix it they did. But not in the traditional way. On day one, they prototyped an app in ServiceNow to take in requests. By day five, they'd extended it to kick off a runbook activity and integrate with the e-commerce engine.

By day 14, their mugs were on the intranet and they had their name on a parking space. Six months later, revenue is up, datacenter expenses are down, and Reggie and Lane have a queue of requests a mile long to replace in-house apps that do everything from manage print jobs to schedule PTO.

Every company has a Reggie and a Lane about to reinvent themselves. They've toiled in obscurity for years, combating IT inefficiency with cynicism and beer. PaaS, that cliched and misunderstood flag-bearer for all that we love about technology, is emerging to eliminate what was once difficult about developing and managing great software. Gone are the days when pale architects are needed to mate with big iron in shadowy datacenters.

Thanks to cloud platforms and the ******** of capable tools with infrastructure (labeled by IT cognoscenti as "DevOps"), a new generation of geeks can build and deploy apps more easily than they can crank out spaghetti workflows in Visio or MS Project.

Reggie and Lane, you're pioneers. And just think of all the quarters you saved championing PaaS.

*Seriously? For (those dwindling few) non-Hogwartians, the Golden Snitch is the coveted, evasive winged object chased by seekers in Quidditch. Think rugby on brooms. And go read the books!