By Lisa M. Schwartz
When is cloud software like an assembly line? Similar to the invention of the automobile assembly line, the first generation of software as a service (SaaS) was a game-changing innovation. The assembly line put more people in cars by making autos cheaper. Similarly, the cloud made applications cheaper and more accessible, providing service when you needed it at a lower cost in the short term.
But just as Henry Ford once said about the first generation of cars produced on an assembly line, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it’s black,” most cloud providers today offer only monochromatic clouds. One shared software application is presumed to fit all.
With some providers, if your company wants to extend the software a little differently to suit your unique business needs, you have to do it using the provider’s proprietary languages—which very few developers are familiar with, and which allow designs only within strict limitations.
The modern cloud should adapt to fit modern business. In order to innovate and stay ahead of your competitors, you must be able to personalize, connect, and secure your business in the cloud. This is where standards-based platform as a service (PaaS) becomes critical. When it comes time to extend and enrich your applications for the way you run your business, you want to take advantage of a widely-available talent pool.
This means using industry-standard development languages such as Java (used by more than nine million developers worldwide) and readily available connections to your databases, other clouds, and systems. And it means cloud-based documentation: Whenever you make changes to your applications, connections and processes, those changes can be tracked and stored in the cloud. No more hunting for documentation when the time comes to make changes to mappings, and no more reliance on integration specialists who may have left the company long ago.
SaaS plus PaaS give you two more critical abilities: They let you connect and secure your business. In a modern digital business, you need to be able to connect to any part of the business, connect to any “thing,” and connect to any person, anywhere.
This includes mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones, but also sensors, cars, wearables, and the other “things” that make up the Internet of Things. It includes connecting back-office finance and operations to applications that are used in managing human resources or that directly touch consumers, and enabling data sharing across the company for better service and more comprehensive reporting. It also includes connecting customers and employees with mobile and social tools to offer new, innovative services.
Complementing your cloud applications with PaaS also lets you secure your entire enterprise more effectively by providing one secure, standards-based cloud platform for your entire business. You can have centralized identity management across applications, data, devices, and people, giving each person access to only the information they need based on their role.
Having one common security strategy gives you better access control over both your cloud and your on-premises applications. We now know the future of manufacturing isn’t the assembly line. The world is moving to more personalized and customized experiences, such as 3-D printing, which allows consumers to design their own products and print them in a matter of hours.
Similarly, modern SaaS and PaaS lets you personalize, connect, and secure your applications, giving you a modern cloud that fits your business, rather than forcing your business to fit to the cloud.
Lisa M. Schwartz is a senior product marketing director in the cloud applications business group at Oracle. You can follow her @leeza2020.
