Who's Using PaaS? The Answer May Surprise You

When Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Coghead hit the skids recently, other PaaS vendors such as Intuit QuickBase and TeamDesk were quick to offer Coghead customers free conversion tools and migration solutions, so they could keep their applications running smoothly in the cloud.

I was curious about the customers making this move. Had they been they using Coghead for in-house skunk works, pilot projects, or operational applications? In large companies, did management concerns about data security, SOX compliance, and other regulations relegate PaaS to department-level projects that were, shall we say, off the management radar screen? Is PaaS (when not an extension of a proven SaaS solution such as Salesforce.com or Sugar On Demand) simply a way of getting code up and running without having to requisition a server from a bureaucratic IT department? Or is PaaS something more?

To find out, I emailed TeamDesk, asking about their customers and the types of applications they were running. I promptly received a phone call from Val Karmazin, co-founder of ForeSoft Corporation, the company that offers TeamDesk. Promptness, it turns out, is a habit at ForeSoft. The company prides itself on prompt, reliable customer service.

ForeSoft offers four cloud computing solutions:

• BUGtracka project management and issue-tracking application
  
• dbFLEX, a platform for building business Web applications
  
• CRMdesk, a help desk application
  
• TeamDesk, a platform for building and easily configuring database applications, primarily for the back office
  

The company was founded in 2001. It's been profitable from the start and hasn't taken any outside investment. TeamDesk, launched three years ago, is now the fastest growing part of the business.

In our conversation, Val made a number of interesting points:

• The TeamDesk user community is a mix of people, and most of them aren't developers. What? I thought PaaS would appeal mostly to developers who were comfortable with Ruby, Python, Java, virtualization, and so on. That's not so in the case of TeamDesk. The platform is so easy to use and so easy to configure, thanks to a configuration dashboard, that many of the users are small business owners or IT engineers who know enough about databases to establish a relationship between two tables, but not much technical knowledge beyond that.
  
• Companies of all sizes are using the service. In addition to small businesses, Val named a major telecommunications carrier, a major shipping company, and a European office of a major Silicon Valley technology provider. Company size doesn't predict whether or not a customer will use PaaS; instead, the determining factor is company culture—how willing is the company to trust a PaaS vendor to do things right. Val says customers take advantage of TeamDesk's free trial, discover how easy to use and reliable the service is, and stick with it.
  
• Val points out the distinction between PaaS and SaaS is often illusory. When his customers use his platform to develop business applications that they then rely on day after day, haven't they created in effect a SaaS solution? Read TeamDesk's case study about the sales management application that Hochkoeppler Initiatives created for a customer, and you'll see what he means.
  
• TeamDesk users sometimes require a little more hands-on assistance from ForeSoft when they're getting started with the service, but so far the support workload remains manageable.
  

A couple of conclusions:

• PaaS is ready for prime time: customers are using it for business applications, not just for development projects.
  
• With the proper tools and application user interface, a PaaS vendor can reach beyond the development community to less technical users, broadening the pool of potential customers.
  
• Small, focused cloud computing vendors who execute well can run a profitable business.