PaaS for Large Organizations

Thanks to @lizasisler for telling  me about this post.  ZDNet has an article about large organizations using PaaS and that it’s not just a small company kind of thing.  The interesting point they make deeper in the article is that PaaS can be used for more than just hosting a site or set of functionality you didn’t want to put in your own data center.  There is power in PaaS to improve the whole development lifecycle. As part of that, they pointed to Panasonic example.  Here’s a couple tidbits.

In a recent survey of 262 enterprises I helped conduct as part of my work with Unisphere Research (and sponsored by Oracle), we found that PaaS is now prevalent among one-fifth of public cloud adopters and half of private cloud sites. Among oublic cloud adopters, PaaS adoption has jumped from 18% to 20% since 2010. This is much higher for harger organizations in the survey — those with 5,000 or more employees — with 31% report adopting PaaS.
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In his article, Labourey provides examples of companies signing onto PaaS to handle development, testing and inetgration within their organizations, including  Groupe Adeo, the fourth largest Do-It-Yourself (DIY) retailer in the world, which employed PaaS to develop an e-commerce application, enabling collaboration among teams in France, India and Belgium.

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The mention of development got me thinking about how developers can use cloud based services in Azure and Office 365 (among many others) to improve development.  Here are a couple thoughts that I’m sure some of our better developers in the Microsoft practice can dive much deeper.

1. Use Office 365 to host communities.  Many don’t think of SharePoint as a development tool but you need someplace to house collaboration and conversation.
2. Office 365’s / SharePoint Online’s app model.  It’s a piece of cake to push a new app from Visual Studio and automatically link it to everything necessary.  It ‘s actually easier to push your new solution out to the cloud than to your own data center.
3. Team Foundation Service in the cloud.  If you want to handle source control, agile planning, continuous builds, etc.; this may be an option for you.  I’ve seen a lot of companies opt for these type of solutions as hosted solutions rather than try to get a server running internally.

This is a short list which I’m sure misses the boat in several areas.  Let me know if you have further thoughts.