SaaS Week

It seems like people are increasingly talking about PaaS, or platform as a service, as being a major technology for cloud computing and future IT developments, so I caught up with David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs, for a conversation about what PaaS is and what it means. Listen to the podcast here or read the transcript below.

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KD: Hi, I'm Krissi Danielsson. Lots of technology is offered "as a service" these days, each type having its own acronym ending in aaS, and one of those acronyms that people are increasingly interested in is PaaS, or platform as a service. Here today to speak with me is David Abramowski, ceo of Morph Labs, a company that focuses on platform as a service.

So my first question is, looking at the concept of platform as a service, people seem to often not know quite what acronyms and new buzzwords mean so you could you talk about the concept of platform as a service and what's meant by that?

DA: Sure, yeah, platform as a service is really, what's new about it is it's, you know, bringing to life a set of technologies and services that have existed for quite some time but in a way that's now consumable by a lot of people and what I mean by that is when you look at a web application, the web application has to live somewhere.

Typically, we've hear of this like hosting and once you have a place to host your application, then the developer has traditionally been required to download software, whether it's open source software or fee-based software and then they have to install all that software, they have to configure it and then they have to make it available to the internet, they have to do all the work required for all of that and then finally, they can deploy their application to that environment and allow it to run.

What platform as a service is is that we've taken all of that, all those difficulties and eliminated them; we've created kind of a standardized environment that the developer no longer has to worry about the infrastructure. All they do is they take their application and deploy it into our system and we take care of all the rest for them. So, the platform includes the technologies, like web servers and databases, operating systems, security systems, it includes managed services like automated back up, 24 hour monitoring, system administrators that actually patch the systems and keep them running. So, all of this together makes the platform as a service. So now you can think of it as a complete system end-to-end to run an application.

KD: So, looking specifically at Ruby on Rails, are there some reasons why platform as a service makes sense for Ruby on Rails and how does that differ from alternative means of running it?

DA: Well, we started with Ruby on Rails because it's kind of on the forefront in term of the Web 2.0 revolution. Ruby on Rails has got a lot of press, actually a lot of adoption in the last couple of years and, I think, the reason we though it was a good target to start with was specifically because, you know, there's a lot of new applications being built on Ruby on Rails and they don't have a home.

So, when people have to go to a hosting provider and have to set it up to run Ruby on Rails, they tend to have some difficulties or have kind of a big challenge ahead of them to actually get the Rail application deployed. So, we saw this and we saw some of those difficulties because we have a lot of Rails developers in-house and so they were able to, you know, look at this whole business problem and solve it, kind of as our first step.

KD: So, looking at the media coverage of Morph Labs, an article a few days ago had some comments by Morph comparing its offerings to Google's App Engine. Can you talk a little more about how Morph's offerings compare?

DA: I think, you know, the way that it compares is really at the highest level which is, you know, the new realm of running your application in the cloud and so when they talk about the cloud, they're talking about, you know, servers elsewhere in a fully configured environment, very similar to what I just described around platform as a service. So, in the Google world, you're able to create and application inside their environment, using their APIs and the languages they support. What we do is a little bit different and it's the same concept which is we allow you to, kind of, you know, create your application and deploy it into this third-party world but we do it based upon open standards and, you know, industry standard-type applications.

So, we support, you know, this is the main differentiator, which is we allow you to build any application you want to build in the languages we support which today is Ruby on Rails and we also just announced here at Java 1, our Java support and that will also support Rails but, you know, when we look at the comparison with Google, it's actually a really good thing because the industry is saying it's time for this type of computing technology, the ability to take your application and run it in the cloud.

KD: OK. Does Morph plan to add additional languages in the future? You mentioned having Rails and Java...

DA: We do. We are going to continue to build out our platform to support the other kind of non-Microsoft languages out there. So, we do not have plans to support .net but we are working on support for, for example, PHP is on our road map as well a Python is on our road map.

KD: All right. Sound good. So, what do you predict overall for the future of platform as a service, there've been some analysts saying that the concept of platform as service could be even more important than software as a service? So what are your thoughts on that?

DA: I do think that there's a very big market ahead of platform as a service. As you think about all of the companies out there that currently run applications to do even the smallest job say within a department. That application has to run somewhere and companies have learned that, you know, buying the hardware, putting in a data center, running the data center is just an extremely expensive proposition so platform as a service allowed even enterprises or even small/medium companies to kind of outsource that, you know, that business.

So, I think there's a big future ahead for platform as a service specifically, I mean, even if you just look at outsourcing of existing applications or even applications that are on the horizon in the next 12-18 months, I mean, every company has a backlog of hundreds of applications that need to be built and those applications have to run somewhere. So, I think that this is just an industry that's going to continue to grow, you know, comparing it to software as a service, you know, software as a service is also a very important aspect but that's typically where you have a third-party that provides an application to a company so platform as a service covers both, let's just call them internal applications and external applications, so internal would be things that they build and external would be things that, you know, they rent or lease like software as service. So, I think that's why we look at the market as being a very large opportunity over the next few years.

KD: Great! this has been Krissi Danielsson of ebizQ speaking with David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs. Thanks for listening!