Enterprises are often disappointed when they move to the cloud. They expect efficiency, flexibility, and productivity gains from virtualization, and it doesn’t happen. They still run into the same IT roadblocks. That’s why they come to us.
Private PaaS is a critical component for companies wanting a complete cloud solution and to fully extract the value from their cloud. I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you what I think are the seven key value propositions for private PaaS as our customers have told us.
Virtualization is not the problem. The real issue is that enterprises don’t take their clouds far enough, and private Platform as a Service (PaaS) is often the missing link. Private PaaS makes the cloud efficient, productive, and transformative. While private PaaS adds value in many areas, it delivers seven key benefits to the adopting enterprise.
With private PaaS, enterprises no longer rely on IT for everything they need. One of our large enterprise clients used to run a two-week development cycle. If developers missed the window of opportunity or if something went wrong, they were forced to wait for the next cycle. With private PaaS, agile development finally becomes a reality. Developers can launch applications within minutes. With one click, they can self-serve and auto provision without being constrained by IT infrastructure.
In today’s world, developers should not be limited by IT. With the right private PaaS, organizations can now choose the most appropriate data service, language, or framework. Most of our customers are “multilingual” and tell us that our multi-language support is one of the most important features they need.
With virtualization, enterprises can scale resources, but not management. IT staff and DevOps don’t scale well, and staff members are now managing more complex requests in higher volumes. Private PaaS solves this problem by managing computing resources and application scalability. For example, one of our enterprise customers can now launch 30 applications into the cloud within the same amount of time that it used to take to launch and
manage one application. If that’s not increased scalability and productivity, I don’t know what is!
Admittedly, virtualization does deliver ROI. With fewer physical servers to buy, cost savings are obvious. But ROI is more than cost savings. It is also about efficiency and productivity gains. And that’s where a private PaaS can make a real difference by reducing application deployment time from months or weeks to minutes.
With private PaaS, enterprises can innovate more and faster. Developers who don’t have to play tag with IT have now more time to actually…develop. They are no longer bound by old processes, backlogs, and wait times. Projects move faster, which makes it easier for enterprises to test out new ideas quickly and safely. With private PaaS, one of our customers, ExactTarget, has significantly ramped up its innovation program.
Portability goes hand in hand with freedom of choice. Private PaaS allows organizations to seamlessly shift between public, private, or hybrid clouds. An infrastructure-agnostic private PaaS grows with the enterprise, and offers the best future-proofing guarantee.
Security is not simply a requirement on a checklist. It must be built-in from the ground up. A private PaaS gives enterprises the control, flexibility, security, and oversight that they need to safely and legally conduct business. Among our customers, we have several defense contractors who use private PaaS for mission-critical applications, and trust the security capabilities of our product.
Private PaaS is a critical component of any private cloud (or public, hybrid cloud), and is really the only way to realize the full potential of the enterprise’s private cloud infrastructure or expanding hybrid cloud infrastructure. The enterprise can spread its wings, and fly direct to transformation and innovation in the cloud.
By Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState
As ActiveState Software’s President and CEO since 2006, Bart Copeland brings more than twenty-three years of leadership, management, finance, and technology business experience to his role.
