IaaS Players vs PaaS Players.

Session Date and Time: Day 1, March 23, 18:45pm EST (15:45am PST) - (30min)
Keywords: IaaS, PaaS, .NET.
Authors: Sinclair Schuller, Apprenda.
Abstract: Whether you’re a veteran independent software vendor (ISV) or a brand new startup ISV getting
off the ground, delivering your business applications via the Software as a Service (SaaS)
paradigm can be a daunting challenge.
Much like most of today’s infrastructure and software models, the cloud model is developing in a
layered, stack-wise fashion. The bottom-most two layers in the cloud stack, Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), have evolved to provide the ISV a way to
significantly lower capital investments in moving their applications to the cloud by being able to
provision infrastructure in an on-demand fashion, a way to fine tune infrastructure capacity to
meet demand requirements, and provide the ISV with access to enterprise grade infrastructure.

IaaS Players v. PaaS Players
IaaS players such as Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid are offering fine grained application
building blocks such as storage and raw compute in the cloud (e.g., S3, Elastic MapReduce), as
well traditional server infrastructure offered up as virtual machines (e.g., EC2) where a IT can
call up new server infrastructure with a few clicks. PaaS vendors such as Google AppEngine
and Microsoft Azure have taken it step further and evolved offerings that attempt to bring
popular runtimes such as Python and Java (Google) as well .NET (Microsoft) to their respective
clouds so that an ISV can write code, upload it, and execute it without worrying about any of the
underlying infrastructure pieces.
The cloud stack described so far has proven to address problems related to infrastructure
provisioning and simplification of getting code to run in the cloud – all of which are naïve to the
delivery paradigm shift of SaaS that requires the ISV to offer their software in a centrally
distributed fashion to customers who will pay for and use the service.
How to Shift to SaaS
ISVs need to worry about things like the application level, things like scale-out, multi-tenancy
(how to allow many customers to efficiently and safely share the same, single application
footprint so that my COGS and incremental delivery costs are a few pennies on the dollar rather
than a few dimes on the dollar), commercialization (how does an ISV charge for a service and
track access and usage rights based on payment) and operational management. Fortunately,
companies like Salesforce.com’s Force.com and Apprenda’s SaaSGrid have set out to solve
this next set of challenges in slightly different ways.
SaaSGrid is a cloud application server that can be layered either on-top of offerings such as
EC2, or on-top of traditional data-center hardware. SaaSGrid can solve challenging application
architecture and engineering issues such as true multi-tenancy and linear scale-out by
endowing applications with no on part of the ISV. It also injects commercialization constructs
into the applications execution flow so marketing and product managers can easily weave in
pricing and provisioning models through a few button clicks in a web portal.
Salesforce.com through its Force.com PaaS have thrown out the notion of layering best of
breed offerings on top of each other in a stack and instead offer a “vertical cloud” as a holistic
silo, complete with a new custom programming language and execution environment running
on-top of a “canned” infrastructure offering.
To make the right decisions when it comes to building a SaaS offering, a CTO needs to
understand the cloud stack. If you have extremely simple applications that could benefit from
extending an existing CRM system and gaining access to Salesforce.com’s customers and don’t
mind being locked into a silo, choose Force.com. If you have existing .NET code or no .NET
code and a team with .NET skills, take a look at offerings like SaaSGrid layered on top of IaaS
vendor offerings. Offerings like SaaSGrid coupled with IaaS provide you with a low COGS
profile without sacrificing quality, all while keeping up front capital investments low and
significantly reducing time to market barriers.
The cloud has much to offer. With a little effort in understanding where each solution belongs in
the cloud stack, every CTO can make the right decisions and build a successful SaaS business
in the cloud.

Bio:
Before co-founding Apprenda, a leading provider of software-as-a-service infrastructure solutions to ISVs and enterprises, Sinclair consulted on and led architecture teams for several mission-critical SaaS applications. Sinclair is an thought leader in multitenant system design and the economics of SaaS platforms and ecosystems, and is a frequent speaker at industry events. Sinclair previously worked at Morgan Stanley, Eden Communications, and the State University of New York (SUNY) and holds dual degrees in Computer Science & Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude.