Making the move from IaaS to IaaS+ [feedly]

Making the move from IaaS to IaaS+
http://feedly.com/e/3V14LQWx

For the last year or so, there has been a general belief in the analyst and press that the boundaries between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS would begin to crumble. Forrester analyst John Rymer was predicting this as far back as 2012. In 2013, we began to see this blurring of lines increase dramatically with IaaS providers continuing to push out new modular services at a break-neck pace, and SaaS providers are continuing to transition their offerings into much more than single purpose software: they are becoming platforms themselves.

Although it's always risky to attempt to predict the future, I've personally come to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of dollars spent on cloud services and technology will remain focused on IaaS and SaaS products. Beyond qualitatively understanding the market through my experiences and customer interactions, this perspective is backed by looking at some of the market growth predictions for PaaS, and comparing this with the overall IaaS and SaaS market. One study suggests that the PaaS market will grow to $6.94B by 2018, but even that may be too high of an estimate. Looking at Gartner's predictions for public cloud service growth, IaaS is predicted reach $24B USD by 2016 and PaaS is too small for them to even label the amount:

Why are the IaaS and SaaS markets so much larger than PaaS? Well, the overwhelming majority of cloud service users that I've spoken with either want more flexibility for their application architectures than a PaaS can offer, or are looking to their SaaS providers to provide them with the right flexibility to turn software services into platform services. Specifically for IaaS, the push to provide more and more higher level services beyond basic compute and storage is enabling application owners to have choice: choice in how they build their applications, choice in how they consume infrastructure and choice in how they tie non-cloud environments into cloud-enabled applications and services.

At CumuLogic, our focus is on enabling IaaS cloud operators (be their internal private clouds or publicly available clouds) to be relevant and competitive by making the transition from pure-play IaaS to IaaS+.

What exactly is IaaS+? It's the addition of two types of services to the core IaaS layer: modular and composition services. If you assume that pure IaaS is typically a combination of compute services (including required networking and block storage) and object storage services, then the first step to IaaS+ is adding higher value offerings like Database-as-a-Service or Cache-as-a-Service. The second step to offering a complete IaaS+ experience to your users is to provide application composition options, similar to how AWS offers Elastic Beanstalk and OpsWorks.

We believe that CumuLogic is unique in our focus, providing the software that's needed to make the move from IaaS and IaaS+. We make it easy for operators, because we come pre-integrated into the most popular IaaS orchestration software (OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and vCloud) being deployed today. If you're a cloud operator, or are building a new cloud service, let us know if you'd like to learn more about how adding IaaS+ services to your own offering.

-chip