By Mitesh Agarwal
In a digital economy, most companies, regardless of the nature of their business, need to have a technology foundation to drive business success. As the number of internet and mobile devices grow exponentially, companies understand that effective ‘mobilisation’ of applications and services are important to reach the tech-savvy consumer. It’s equally important to achieve speed to market in a highly competitive business landscape. Technology solutions like Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) can help companies with cloud and mobile enablement of their new and legacy applications while accelerating the delivery and scalability of those applications.
However, a study by Oracle reveals that while 85 percent of businesses across Asia Pacific (APAC) recognise the business benefits of agility (i.e., ability to quickly adjust to new business opportunities or iterate new products and services) – nearly 74 percent are not aware that they can use PaaS solutions to reduce application development timeframes and easily tailor and integrate third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) apps into their business. In fact only 26 percent of respondents state that they fully understand PaaS.
Value proposition of PaaS
PaaS refers to turnkey solutions running in the cloud – a portfolio of cloud services for application development, data management, integration, business analytics, mobile, content and collaboration, and IT operations management. It enables rapid provisioning of resources as and when required to execute software production and deployment cycles without compromising on quality or efficiency. In some cases, the provisioning, configuration, and integration of a platform can take up the majority of an application production schedule. PaaS allows developers to pick and choose what they need from prefabricated environments without being hampered by cumbersome authorisation and procurement processes, which are known to slow down the pace of production.
When application workloads fluctuate, PaaS can scale in and out to better match supply with demand. It frees up IT organisations investment and time for procuring, provisioning and maintaining the underlying infrastructure for application development. Organizations using PaaS have reported operational savings of up to 50 percent compared to having individual project teams manage their own siloed technology stacks. The cost savings most commonly come from standardization and consolidation of resources (e.g., servers), as well as the elimination of redundant work across teams.
Integrating legacy applications
Companies that have made heavy investments in on-premise IT infrastructure also benefit from the capability to implement cloud-based middleware and data management solutions that tie their modern digital front-end with existing back-end systems for integrated IT functionalities. They can maintain separate and secure public and private environments with seamless portability between them. PaaS speeds up the development and deployment of modern business applications using services designed for developer productivity from Java applications to mobile application to simple mashups with built-in continuous delivery.This allows development and testing to be contained without impacting production systems, while also providing a quick and effortless mechanism to deploy production-ready software for use by customers.
Speed time to market
In addition, Cloud data services bring together data from a variety of on-premise and cloud sources to deliver business value through analytics leveraging Big Data technology. A cloud-delivered data platform helps companies keep up with growth of data without overwhelming their on-premise datacentres. Vendors are bringing in new services like document management, cognitive/machine learning, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) on cloud platforms. From a business perspective, the on-demand availability of these compute resources shortens the concept to launch time period necessary to get the first movers advantage in a highly competitive marketplace. An integrated IT system also helps companies offer uniform digital experience to consumers whether they engage with or make a product/ service purchase using desktop, tablet, mobile or by calling the customer care.
According to a 2014 IDC study, while customers began their cloud journey using public clouds to test, and develop applications, a large percentage of customers are now running their production applications in a public environment. Regardless of the implementation model, IDC sees investment in cloud software and the PaaS market growing at a much higher pace than investment in traditional software. While the overall application development and deployment market is expected to grow at an annual rate of about 8 percent from 2013 to 2018, the PaaS market is expected to grow at about 27 percent for the same period.
Readying up for scale
For example, 7-Eleven, one of the world’s largest chains of convenience stores, wanted to beat competition by adopting a more aggressive digital channel strategy to engage with the highly mobile consumer base. In 2014 they deployed PaaS to dynamically provision infrastructure and middleware services on demand. The implementation helped them significantly reduce development and mobile application upgrade cycles. An initial test environment build took less than 15 minutes, current production environments could be implemented in less than 30 minutes, and future production builds covering more than 60 virtual servers will take them less than six hours. They received phenomenal response to their app and had to quickly double the capacity and the PaaS model helped them meet the demand. Today 7-Eleven successfully handles 4 million transactions a day with a 99.999% uptime.
In today’s fast-paced, highly competitive, multichannel, digital marketplace it’s not just important to innovate but it’s also equally important to innovate fast. 7-Eleven is a classic example of a traditional enterprise that successfully transformed its business model by investing in PaaS to keep pace with the new digital economy. Speed is the name of the game and to win mind share and wallet share companies can no longer ignore cloud technologies like PaaS to stay ahead in the race.
Mitesh is the Vice President – Sales Consulting, Oracle India
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