PaaS – salami or gourmet burger

Earlier this year I characterised platform as a service as the filling in my ‘cloudburger’:

This isn’t meant to infer that PaaS is the tastiest piece of the cloud, though the recent acquisition of SpringSource by VMWare for $420m would seem to suggest this (well done Rod and team). What I was in fact trying to show with this illustration is that PaaS is a thinner piece of the overall value stack than either the underlying infrastructure as a service (IaaS) where the value comes mostly from the capital assets in the data center, or the Software as a Service (SaaS) that’s built on top – delivering the actual business functions.

My model seems to tally much better with the more modest price of $28m paid by Tibco for the acquisition of DataSynapse. So why the huge gap? Why is DataSynapse a salami PaaS, whilst SpringSource is a juicy fat gourmet burger? Here are some thoughts on what happened:

I started working with DataSynapse around the back end of 2003 just as ‘grid’ and ‘utility computing’ were becoming white hot in financial services IT. At the time it seemed like DataSynapse and Platform Computing would be the next big tech IPOs, but things didn’t work out that way. Grid struggled to escape from the world of High Performance Computing (HPC), despite all the promise that it held to revolutionise development and infrastructure management. I think part of the problem was around flexibility – grid platforms like DataSynapse had too much of it. They didn’t say to the developer ‘this is the right way to do things, and we’re going to help you get there’, but rather ‘you can run anything on this platform’, ‘you can bring out your smelly old legacy code, it will still work’; and by and large that’s exactly what happened – smelly old code got lifted off cobbled together home brew HPC platforms and dropped onto the shiny new grid middleware. The result of this is that there wasn’t anything compelling for developers to get their teeth into. There was also precious little engagement with the developer community on places like TheServerSide.com (which still mattered back then).

I do recall one app where the dev team were persuaded to use the grid rather than building a dedicated infrastructure. They saved months of development time by making use of the PaaS qualities of the grid, and also didn’t have to bother themselves with the usual hassles of buying hardware. I’m still somewhat stunned that more developers weren’t pushed in that direction (especially given the noise about utility computing that my CIO was making at the time), but there was a huge gap between rhetoric and governance.

So… grid failed to escape the HPC gravitation field because it failed to attract developers. Which is exactly what didn’t happen with Spring. Spring began it’s life in the full glare of TheServerSide, it was the community that made it what it became. It was, and remains, compelling to developers because it leads them to the right way to do things, which is also the simple way to do things. Adrian’s work on folding aspect oriented programming (AOP) under the hood of Spring was pure genius (I remain impressed to this day by a presentation he once gave where there were powerful code examples in a large readable font on PowerPoint slides). Open Source was a key factor in Spring’s popularity and success, though I feel that there were times when this didn’t guarantee commercial success. Rod has indeed done an awesome job of turning a consulting firm into a VC backed Open Source firm into the PaaS piece of the worlds most successful virtualisation company. I’m probably not alone in wondering where the rabbit came from when it got pulled out of the hat. Of course it remains to be seen whether VMW get their money’s worth from the deal, but at less than 4% of their present market capitalisation perhaps the PaaS piece is still a thin filling in their burger?

There are more cloudburgers to be made here. Obviously Microsoft’s Azure is going to have a significant impact, especially for all those with a .Net leaning, and makes them an unlikely acquirer of anything else in this space. Citrix now surely has to make a move to get some kind of PaaS story. DataSynapse’s old competitor Platform Computing is still independent and has a reasonably strong customer base. It’s also worth keeping an eye on Paremus, as their service fabric arguably beats SpringDM at its own game.