Telcos being pulled towards PaaS 22 February, 2009 By Chris Talbot

PromoPipeline Exclusive Channel Promotions Find Out How You Can Make Money Today! ENROLL FREE! >> Factory Direct Should Not be Cheaper William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Cloud Ecosystem II: A Candid Conversation with Oracle Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Cloud Ecosystem: A Candid Conversation with Rackspace Hosting Beth Vanni - Amazon Consulting Channel Manager Compensation William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels Financial Expertise William Vanderbilt - Innovative Learning Channels

While SaaS has become a rather common term in the technology industry, PaaS is still an emerging concept, said Caroline Chappell, research analyst with Light Reading's Services Software Insider and author of the report. Telcos are used to being the ones providing services to their customers, but PaaS creates a new model for them. PaaS is a collaborative technology that makes it possible for independent software vendors (ISVs) to build applications that would work with a organization's (in this case, a telco's) software. The applications are hosted in the cloud and are then generally sold to the telco's customers.

Instead of buying development tools, PaaS presents the opportunity to rent them and gain the added benefit of collaboration, Chappell explained.

PaaS offers a number of advantages to developers, but it also offers the ability for telcos to have others build cloud-based software to fill out gaps in their portfolios and create solutions that are more than the sum of their parts. It does require telcos to give up a certain amount of control, though -- control they're used to having, she said.

"Telcos are going to have to relax some of their proprietariness around themselves" and possibly encourage ecosystems that enable developers to collaboratively build services with them, Chappell said.

While SaaS already makes a lot of sense to telcos, PaaS is something they're still exploring. What is likely to happen is they'll adopt both methods of serving their customers because they're complementary, Chappell said. Full adoption is likely to take at least three to five years, in part because it's a big change for telcos, she said. The two will begin to merge, though.

"You can see that at the moment with Salesforce.com. It's a software-as-a-service, but it also has a platform-as-a-service called Force.com," Chappell said. Telcos are likely to follow a similar model.

This isn't just happening with telcos, either.

"This is a whole industry shift. This is not just a telco shift. This is something that's affecting how software is being developed right across the board," Chappell said.

It'll also represent a big change for ISVs, who will have to rearchitect their software applications for cloud computing. While middleware exists to bridge the gap between conventional software and cloud computing, it will eventually disappear, becoming part of the operating systems, Chappell said.

"There's a lot that the vendors need to do to prepare their applications, prepare their own development strategies so they can actually work out where they fit in," she said.