Labourey thinks many IT organizations don't know how they'll meet the new surge. "Are we going to be ten times more productive?" he asks. "Are we going to hire ten times more developers? How can we do that?"
A part of the answer, according to Labourey, is finding new ways to be more efficient. For example, as large organizations build mobile applications, those applications are going to have to tie back to the large, business-critical applications that you have on-premises. "The on-premises environment," Labourey says, "must remain stable. You don't want to touch it, but then you have this funky mobile application on the other hand, and how do you bridge that gap?"
Labourey suggests a great place to start to take advantage of PaaS is with communication servers that talk with the mobile clients out in the world and the legacy applications on your own servers.
To those who still think PaaS is just for startups, Labourey presents some fairly impressive financial figures from Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leading provider of cloud infrastructure. "If you look at the revenue that they did from 2006 to ... 2010, it remained relatively flat," he says. "At that point you could argue that it was only for startups and for build-and-test." But in the last few years, according to Labourey, AWS has gone through a giant surge and is expected to do almost 4 billion dollars in revenue.
This will bring them neck and neck with VMware, the leader in virtualization, says Labourey. It will also give AWS about three times as much revenue as Red Hat, which is a major force in the open source world, and bring them up to about a third of the revenue Dell is expected to bring in from servers, storage and networking. "So if this is just about startups and build-and-test, you're going to need a lot of startups," he concludes.
So what is it that's brought so much new business to AWS over the past few years? Labourey says it's primarily time to market. Citing the surge in the enterprise need for new applications, he says enterprises need to find new ways of developing. "If you want to be successful," he warns, "You can't just rely on the same old high-friction steps. You need to have something much faster."
For instance, developers at a financial institution might need three to four months just to get an empty server via established channels. On the other hand, Labourey claims the same financial institution could develop a completely new service from start to finish in that same time with PaaS. "It's not about cost," he says. "Most of the time it's really about 'I want it now. I want it yesterday. How do I do that?'" Where traditional IT operations might not be able to handle these requests, because they have a backlog of projects and limited resources, opportunities for developers to increase efficiency with PaaS resources may become available.
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