How are enterprises looking at Cloud PaaS?

Everyone in the cloud adoption journey are talking about IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Possibly the adoption is highest as IaaS services now, but enterprises are looking at PaaS and SaaS, to further simplify IT, bring in more agility and innovation apart from cost reduction.

@Microsoft launched #Azure PaaS in the market much ahead of time and did not get the required traction. @Amazon made right move with AWS as IaaS and started leading the cloud platform, which made Microsoft also move towards IaaS. But the first level of cloud benefits with Infrastructure simplification and cost reduction are not prime objectives of cloud transformation any more. 

With new-age companies (startups) coming up with innovative business ideas and disrupting the traditional business model, the enterprises are looking at what value can cloud provide them.

1. Value Lever - Can cloud open up new avenues to develop new business solutions in an experimental manner, and scale as the business starts growing. IT leaders are seeing this as the major goal going forward, contributing to the topline of the business and not talk about an initiative to reduce cost, which goes through multiple rounds of business case, TCO and ROI justification.
2. Cost Lever - Taking out in operations and bring in agility

 Agility in traditional IT systems was challenge due to multiple layers incl. Data Center, Compute/ storage/ network infrastructure, Infrastructure management, middleware and databases, platform management, application development and support. PaaS simplifies all the complexities and portfolio owners have to just focus on application development. So what is the right PaaS model for the enterprises.

1.  AWS and Microsoft claim that the native cloud PaaS services are great way for the enterprises to get started and build enterprise scale on them. But it has it owns challenges of stickiness to AWS or Azure. It is becoming tightly coupled and bound like the #mainframe era, which enterprises are still struggling to move out.
2. Managed Platform like #CloudFoundry and #OpenShift are another breed of PaaS solution which eliminate significant portion of the platform operations complexity, giving the flexibility of choosing programming languages and middleware of your choice with an element of platform management still to be done. This extra operation effort is turning out to be worthy investment for the IT leaders in the enterprises, as this helps them standardizing the IT application platform, while giving the flexibility to consume infrastructure from on premise, private cloud, hosted cloud to public cloud.

 So what should be the cloud PaaS model that enterprises should adopt, that provides maximum agility and ability to leverage the technology advancements. Few questions that would help make the decision,

1.  Can enterprises drive organization level standardization of the platform, so that investment in Managed platform does not appear as significant cost In one application cluster/ portfolio?
2. Do we need to support innovations (rapid innovation) in the edges when the traditional enterprise IT management principles have not changed at the enterprise level?
3. If technology is a differentiator for my business, who should be in control of the technology, my enterprise or the cloud service provider?
4. Should the power to pick up any new technology and put into application use, be in the hands of the enterprise or wait for the CSP to provide it in their platform? Note: The CSP are now pushing most widely useful technologies into their services at rapid rates, but do you really need it faster than that rate or need niche technologies to be adopted. (AWS & Azure will not have incentive to bring niche technologies into their platform)

Rolling out managed platform like CloudFoundry or OpenShift in an organization is a big decision, it is just not about setting up the platform first time, but also continuous adoption with flexible processes to bring in new technologies at rapid rate. It should not be like the Enterprise Technology standards body of the past decades, which acted as a gatekeeper which was maintaining robustness at organization level, but was not helpful in fighting the competition at the edges which was coming from technology led companies.