Moving Up the Stack

The 2014 tier of Axway’s infographic, “The Cloud: Impact and Adoption – Predictions for Today and Tomorrow,” features a note that “SaaS vendors and enterprises (will) pressure IaaS vendors to ‘move up the stack’ to PaaS and provide management, security, regulatory and disaster recovery services.”

We see this happening already. Amazon, for instance, is adding services on top of its EC2 offering’s raw infrastructure, including data-storage capabilities via elastic block storage, described as “off-instance storage that persists independently from the life of an instance”; messaging capabilities that allow cloud applications to communicate with one another; and disaster recovery capabilities that ensure all data is safe and all applications have optimal uptime.

If you’re merely looking to use cloud applications like Salesforce (a CRM application) or Workday (an HR application), then this trend of consolidation—where large infrastructure players are adding more and more capabilities to their infrastructure offerings and becoming platform offerings—might not be so important to you, as all infrastructure and platform issues that might affect you are hidden behind your application.

But if you’re looking to move your own proprietary applications to the cloud, then you must consider the long-term potential of your cloud provider very carefully.

Taking advantage of one of the smaller PaaS vendors and building applications using their technology might be a tempting option. But keep in mind that it’s very likely that in two or three years, IaaS vendors that have successfully “moved up the stack” will add more and more of the smaller PaaS vendors’ capabilities to their basic offerings, forcing those vendors out of the market and sending those vendors’ clients scrambling to find new cloud homes.

What would you do if you found yourself in those clients’ shoes?

(This post was first published at http:blogs.axway.com)