August 2010

While many see speed and low cost as benefits to platform-as-a-service offerings, most enterprises are watching the leaders.

By Doug Bartholomew

Bootleg. Maverick. Whatever you call it, information technology is full of instances of wholesale technology changes that were introduced by the business, or by business-unit developers, without traditional IT support.

Often, the upshot of these incursions for CIOs has been to get with the program or get out of the way. If the CIO gets out of the way, however, he or she is often postponing the inevitable cleanup that needs to occur in the future. Now, some see cloud-based software application development — also referred to as platform as a service (PaaS) — becoming the next emerging technology to start at the grass roots of the organization. PaaS is similar to the emergence of Visual Basic, PowerBuilder and other tools that empowered small teams to rapidly build applications focused on an immediate business problem without going through central IT development.

“There’s not a CIO out there who isn’t [getting] pressure to adopt the economics of the cloud for software development,” says Oren Michels, CEO at Mashery, a four-year-old Web-application services firm in San Francisco. “In bigger companies, [cloud development] is happening at the grassroots level,” Michels says. “At the majority of Fortune 500 companies, applications are being built on the cloud, but the CIO may not know about it.”

Dipping in Their Toes at Sony Pictures

Many CIOs are interested in utilizing PaaS, yet are moving slowly. “We are doing proof of concepts with Force.com and Amazon,” says David Buckholtz, Vice President and Division CIO for Enterprise and Corporate Technology at Sony Pictures Entertainment in Culver City, Calif. He sees value in the idea but says, “Basically, we’re just dipping our toe in to start.”

David Buckholtz

Why the caution? “One reason is that there are barriers with our legacy code because everything we do is connected,” Buckholtz explains. Also, “there’s a lot more certification that has to be done from a security standpoint before we do more development on the cloud platform.” Sony Entertainment is using cloud models in other areas of the business, but when it comes to “pure application development,” he says, security and scalability issues are obstacles.

Many other IT organizations are also waiting until PaaS matures. “We haven’t seen cloud app development formalized with IT groups,” says Forrester Research Vice President and Principal  Analyst, James Staten. “More often, individual developers, who are more closely aligned to the business than to central IT, are developing on the cloud,” he says. These software mavericks or "cowboy developers," may also use agile development technologies and open development languages and work outside of IT guidelines, Staten says.

While business units may get their apps written more quickly using PaaS, there are trade-offs. “The biggest one is that if your deployment platform isn’t the cloud, and you plan to deploy the application on in-house servers, the application differs in the way it behaves,” Staten says. Likewise, “if you are testing the scalability of an application in the cloud, you will scale it differently” in a production environment, he adds.

James Staten

Security, Access Issues

Staten also agrees with Buckholtz’s concern about security and ensuring that an application is not accessible to outside parties, “especially if it involves a customer-facing application. For that reason, most organizations are not comfortable with putting their applications up on the cloud — but that will change,” he predicts.

For Mashery, development in a cloud environment was a no-brainer. As a small software company with no in-house servers, all its applications are hosted in the cloud. “It’s pure economics,” Michels says. “We’ve been able to do all of our development, launch and scaling for well under $1 million in cumulative infrastructure costs over four years.” The company has 80 customers and 33 employees, he says. “There’s no way I could be running this company on servers I bought” without spending well over $1 million.

Oren Michaels

Of course, Mashery’s business model is uniquely positioned for cloud services: It serves as a front end for other companies’ Web services, providing them with application programming interfaces (APIs) and infrastructure services. Mashery’s APIs, in fact, are a means by which many software developers are building cloud-based applications.

For more traditional enterprises, it may take years to fully embrace the notion of hosted software development. The tools and functionality required for enterprise-level application development are very new, holding back acceptance, analysts say.

Nevertheless, vendors are striving to change that situation. Salesforce.com’s Force.com has a several-year lead on Microsoft’s Azure platform, but both are maturing quickly, says Mike West, Vice President and analyst at Saugatuck Technology Inc.

New Applications Offered

Some software companies are developing new applications on cloud platforms for their internal use and to help their customers. The CA Labs development center, a part of CA Technologies’ initiative to strengthen relationships with research communities, “is trying the platform to see if any new products can be developed on it, or if we can port existing products to run on PaaS,” says Don Ferguson, Chief Technology Officer. “We have already shipped a product called Agile Planner, which we developed on Force.com,” he says. Agile Planner is an online application that complements CA’s Clarity? Project and Portfolio Management product. Force.com was ideally suited for this application, Ferguson says, and, “the platform’s productivity allowed us to go from concept to shipped product in six months.”

Don Ferguson

Ferguson also sees “quite a few customers using Force.com for application development and deployment of new applications.” Therefore, CA Labs is conducting “early proofs-of-concept for managing and securing applications that span on-premises systems, Force.com, Azure and other cloud services,” he says.

CA Technologies as a whole uses about 30 to 40 cloud services, which is a surprisingly large number, Ferguson says. In one case, CA used Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to run a customers’ beta test of a CA service desk application. “Instead of our customers having to buy a machine to run the beta with us, we run the beta on EC2,” Ferguson says. Elsewhere in the company, CA developers can take advantage of CA’s Labs on Demand, an internal self-service reservation portal based on CA Virtual Automation.

Despite much progress, “cloud platforms remain confusing for enterprise IT,” says analyst West. “You have to be a true early adopter who fears no nosebleed,” to move full-steam ahead. At the same time, West believes that once cloud platforms have sufficiently matured, “Enterprises are going to have to change the way they do things.”

Mashery’s Michels’ advice is even more direct: CIOs must test the waters for cloud-based application development — and quickly. “The cloud does not start as a CIO purchase,” Michels contends. “It’s purchased by someone in a business unit slapping down a credit card.” Without CIO action, another IT back door may be left open.

Doug Bartholomew is a business and technology journalist based in Berkeley, Calif.

ASK THE EXPERT

 

David Buckholtz, Vice President and Divisional CIO of Enterprise and Corporate Technology, Sony Pictures Entertainment

David is responsible for the company’s shared-technology strategy, global IT sourcing, and quality across the studio's business units and territories. He also oversees operation and support of Sony Pictures’ global financial, human resource and procurement applications, as well as business intelligence, identity management, integration, and enterprise content platforms.
His previous positions at Sony Pictures Entertainment included vice president of Enterprise Technology and Quality and Executive Director of Enterprise Architecture.
Before joining SPE, David spent five years at GE as chief architect for consulting services at GE Information Services, and as the technology lead for several GE corporate digitization initiatives. He holds a Six Sigma black belt. Before GE, he was in the financial services industry and also developed customer internet applications. David began his career as a marketing analyst for GTE Mobilnet, now part of Verizon Wireless.

Donald F. Ferguson, Distinguished Engineer, Executive VP and Chief Technology Officer at CA Technologies

Don defines CA’s technical strategy and the architecture and technical definition for CA’s products. The Office of the CTO, which Don leads, also has responsibilities for CA Labs, CA’s research organization, and for an advanced technology group.

Prior to joining CA, Don was a Microsoft Technical Fellow working in the Office of the CTO. He worked on various projects exploring the future of enterprise software, with a special emphasis on Web services and Internet application platforms.

Don spent 20 years with IBM, becoming an IBM Fellow in 2001, and was the chief architect for the WebSphere product family. As chief architect, Don focused on design issues and initiatives spanning the DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli, Lotus and Rational product families. His hobbies include Kenpo Karate and Krav Maga.

Oren Michels, co-founder and CEO of Mashery

Oren co-founded and managed WiFinder, an international provider of directory services for public access WiFi hotspots, and has served as president for two companies: Colt HR and Winebid.com, an online wine auction service. Oren also served as president and CEO of The Groundlings, an entertainment production company, and has held COO positions at several manufacturing companies. Prior to joining Mashery, he was vice president of business development at Feedster, where he managed activities in China and negotiated partnerships with AOL, Real Networks and Mitsui.

Oren began his career as a software designer for Hughes Aircraft. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial studies from UCLA's Anderson School.

James Staten  Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester

James serves infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester, focusing on best-practice use of emerging infrastructure technology and services trends, including cloud computing, infrastructure consolidation and application-specific infrastructure optimization. He also advises clients on IT's role in business empowerment and HERO enablement.
James has more than 20 years' experience in the industry, having served as a reseller, vendor strategist, chief marketing officer, journalist and analyst for companies including Autodesk, Azul Systems, Gartner, Rockwell International and Sun Microsystems.
He is a frequent speaker at industry, corporate, educational and Wall Street events, and has guest-lectured at leading business schools.
Working out of Forrester's Foster City, Calif., office, James holds a master's degree from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California and a bachelor's degree from the University of North Texas.

Michael West, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Saugatuck Technology

Michael has over 25 years experience in IT at John Hancock, Fidelity Investments, Apple Computer, Gartner, and the Corporate Executive Board in addition to Saugatuck. He served as Vice President and Research Director at Gartner from 1991-1999.