Infrastructure cloud services take a shift toward PaaS

Moves by services providers are slow and steady, says Philbert Shih, an analyst at Structure Technology, who says he doesn't expect a major shift away from IaaS to PaaS, in other words a progression by certain providers. "All the major players are in the long run going to get there," he says. "The innovation is out there, it's just a matter of time, development work and refining of a platform that will be offered by the provider."

The PaaS market

Various IaaS providers are taking different approaches into the PaaS market. Some, like Tier 3, are the PaaS offering in-house. Others are using mergers, acquisitions and partnerships to build out a PaaS offering. AT&T, for instance, announced in November offerings that incorporate LongJump's platform service. VMware has Cloud Foundry, which is an open source PaaS model that has begun to gain traction with other open source cloud vendors. Piston Cloud Computing, one of the pioneers of the OpenStack movement, recently announced a partnership to leverage Cloud Foundry and in the end support the VMware-backed project in OpenStack. There are even moves by traditional software as a service players, just as Salesforce.com, moving into the PaaS space, with the company's Force.com offering. In the meantime, Windows Azure is a pure-play PaaS.

"It's a trend we're seeing and it makes sense," says Rich Wolski, co-founder and CTO of Eucalyptus Systems, an open source IaaS provider and a cloud industry watcher. In technology research, he says, the natural progression is to start at the bottom of the stack and work up, which is what he sees happening in cloud computing. "It makes sense to go infrastructure first and PaaS second," he says. Eucalyptus is evaluating what moves, if any, it will make in the PaaS market, he says.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.