Who will PaaS, who will fail?

Blue chip companies such as Amazon, IBM, and Salesforce have secured their place in the Infrastructure as  Service (Iaas) and Platform as a Service (Paas) segments of the cloud market, but they are not alone. Smaller players like Cloudbees are also entering into this space. In early March, Cloudbees raised a round of $11.2 million from Verizon Ventures, the added liquidity is to be further strengthen their foothold as a PaaS provider.

The spending frenzy on IaaS and PaaS roll-outs is well on its way, and the blue chip players are spending aggressively. Take IBM for example, in February they announced that they will be spending $1 billion towards their PaaS initiatives. IBM’s strategy makes sense, they want to make it easier for users to import and run its applications – its all about usability and accessibility of data.

The biggest advantage of PaaS is that it allows developers to rapidly build, test, and deploy applications. The cloud plays a big role in this because it eliminates the need for expensive hardware and software.

It is no secret that technology players have always bucked the trend, but now we are also noticing that non-tech players are also actively embracing PaaS. Take HireLabs for example, it is an assessment provider, which also white labels it technology for the HR industry has taken the lead in building a platform where developers can leverage the its ODNA technology to build different HR application. Although HireLabs has not disclosed how much it is budgeting to spend on a PaaS roll-out, it would not be surprising if HireLabs is following in the footsteps of Cloudbees.

Regardless of the budgets that companies like HireLabs allocate towards their PaaS, their secret to success will be if they constantly innovate, and fail fast, learn and try again. These PaaS providers should test their strategies with minimal investment, this will allow them to organically reach a critical threshold indicating that they are now ready for a wide-scale development.