Avoid falling into the cloud: PAAs providers provide the next level of service

IT, communications, and managed service providers have considered http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/13748.html "> infrastructure as a service into the cloud. But with the development of the cloud market, IaaS will become increasingly unprofitable. Platform as a service may be a better chance to differentiate itself in this already crowded market.

GoDaddy.com, a domain-hosting provider, recently blocked a cloud server, its infrastructure, a service (IAAS) product, which, in less than a year, was not the only provider to make the mistake of rushing into the cloud with IAAS products, Tom Cimi, president of the company. Nolle said.

PAAs provider: Upgrade stack to avoid cloud failure

To ensure a successful entry into the cloud, the provider needs to know its customers. Hosting providers for commercial IaaS will not see success because their customers are typically small businesses, without in-house technical support, and without the complex it needs of large IT companies, Nolle said.

"If providers want to avoid failure, like GoDaddy's IaaS cloud business, they need to crawl over the stack to provide a higher level of service," he said. Even cloud giants such as Amazon and IBM regard PAAs as a long-term winner.

PAAs is the next step above the IaaS stack, allowing providers to provide differentiated services to customers in the form of application interfaces (APIs), which can open software as a service (SaaS) application. PAAs products serve as a virtual operating system for customers, but not every customer wants to use the same platform or operating system, which means that market opportunities are narrower than standard IaaS products.

"Everyone is selling IaaS to the same buyers, but the provider can sell PAAs to different platforms, such as Linux platforms," Nolle said. Unlike IaaS, PAAs providers and customers have less administrative burdens because everyone uses the operating system and middleware tools.

"PAAs providers look at users as if they were different applications in a variety of programming environments, use resources more efficiently, and return the equivalent of better input and output," Nolle said.

While PAAs can help the starting cloud provider differentiate in a crowded cloud market, it is still a threat to some service providers. Only 55% of service providers currently offer PAAs to their customers, says Iaas,infonetics's data center and cloud guidance analyst, compared with 95%.

But if they already provide IaaS, hosting or service providers can easily become PAAs providers, as long as they want to invest more in the cloud business in the marketplace, and establish how PAAs is structured so that customers can easily access it.

"Many providers want to use their products to wash the word ' cloud ', but if they are willing to invest a little more, they will succeed in PAAs in the cloud market," Nolle says. "PAAs is a higher value chain, replacing more buyers ' costs, generating higher potential cost savings for customers, and provide better benefits to the provider. ”

Overcoming high competition and price barriers

Large cloud providers are struggling to keep their products at the cost advantage of their customers. Amazon has steadily lowered its Amazon elastic cloud Computing (EC2) Price, its IaaS product, which has been reduced 19 times since it was released in 2006.

"It's scary to find the right price model," said Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst at Forrester, "sometimes not about platforms." It's about how service providers enter the cloud to keep the price wars of the rest of the big vendors, even the established cloud providers. ”

For traditional hosting providers, such as GoDaddy, prices are competing downward, Bartoletti said. "When you've determined that the cloud provider continues to slash prices, it's hard for providers to catch up and provide profitable cloud services," he said.

While it is not easy to compete with large, complete cloud providers, the market-leading service providers can see success by delivering high levels of products, such as Amazon's Amazon Web service, Cimi's Nolle said. "The beauty of going to a higher level in the cloud stack is that the cloud provider is starting to differentiate itself from other providers, so that the product becomes more competitive," Nolle, "and if a provider cannot differentiate it from other providers, it will not be profitable." ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)