My colleague John Rymer expects platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology to “cross the chasm” into mainstream status over the next three years (2012-2014). Today, PaaS solutions, which provide application development and deployment tools abstracted from the underlying cloud infrastructure on which they run your apps, fall into four types: 1) Pure cloud integrated development environments (IDEs); 2) Traditional IDEs that offer the option of cloud deployment; 3) IDE-neutral cloud runtimes that can run apps built by multiple types of IDEs; and 4) PaaS solutions designed for use by business developers. John sees all four of these categories aiming to cross the chasm in this timeframe but doesn’t expect all four segments to succeed in making that transition.

Why does this matter? PaaS is one of the easiest and most productive ways to take advantage of cloud economics, and the elasticity of the cloud, by providing an easily consumable elastic app platform. Today, most apps for the cloud either lack the ability to automatically scale up or down in their use of cloud resources, based on demand, or else gain that ability through complex programming to low-level APIs and frameworks. PaaS provides access to the cloud without all the drama. Only through taking full advantage of these attributes of the cloud can your business realize the full benefits the cloud theoretically provides.

At a recent roundtable discussion with Forrester’s leading application development & delivery (ADD) and customer experience analysts, my colleagues and I explored the topic of how application delivery must change to address the age of the customer. Today’s customers have tremendous influence and reach through social media, more options and choices for whom to buy from, and high expectations about how they want to be served. In response to this new reality, we see many businesses making moves to dramatically increase their focus on the customer experience. These shifting priorities bring huge changes to application delivery organizations, as ADD professionals must now embrace the customer-centric skills, culture, and processes essential to success in the age of the customer. 

What follows is an excerpt from that discussion. For more, download a free copy of the Forrester report “Application Delivery Must Enter The Age Of The Customer” (site registration required) and join us at Forrester’s upcoming Application Development & Delivery Forum on September 22-23.

Mike Gualtieri: As application development professionals, we’re often asked by the business to design a very focused app. As such, we’re often not in a position where we can think about that bigger picture. Sometimes, we’re just told that we need to develop an app for this. And that’s our job; that’s what we have to do, and we have to do the best we can. Would you recommend that we try to think bigger and then push back on the business when they ask us to do that?

 Are you winning? No, this is not about Charlie Sheen! I mean, are you one of the “fortunate” ones leading application delivery in a firm that is winning?

Today’s economy is a mix of winners and losers, with winners weighted strongly toward firms, industries, and regions experiencing rapid growth in customer demand for experiences that integrate their lives across multiple digital (mobile, web, …) and physical (retail, auto, …) touchpoints. App delivery leaders experiencing this rapid growth would say it is “the best of times,” except for how hard it is to keep up — the business demands more and more, faster and faster! So “winning” can be a mixed blessing in software, too:
 

Relevant Advice For “Winning” App Delivery Leaders

Lately I’ve been working with the speakers for our upcoming Application Development & Delivery Forum 2011, Sep 22-23, 2011, in Boston*, helping them to prepare their keynote and track sessions, and I’ve been struck by how relevant their advice will be for these “winning” app delivery leaders. This is all by design – we are aiming this event squarely at solving the problems you winners face.

I recently attended the second annual “Canonical Model Management Forum” at the Washington Plaza Hotel in Washington, DC (see here for my post about last year’s, first meeting, including Forrester’s definition of canonical modeling). Enterprise or information architects from a number of government agencies as well as several of the major banks, insurance companies, retailers, credit-card operators, and other private-sector firms attended the meeting. There was one vendor sponsor (DigitalML, the vendor of IgniteXML). There were a number of presentations by the attendees about their environments, what had motivated them to establish a canonical model, how that work had turned out, and the important lessons learned.

Last year I also had some recent Forrester survey results to share – we have not yet rerun that survey, but we are on the verge of rerunning it, so I’ll post some key results from that once the data is available.

Last year’s post is still the place to go to get the general overview about why to do canonical modeling, the main use cases, some areas of controversy (still raging), and a list of best practices I heard attendees agree upon.

What’s New In 2011?

Based both on what I heard at this meeting and on other recent interviews:

“Big Data” is coming up more often on the agendas of key vendors as well as some of the more-advanced users of information management technology. Although some of this increased activity reflects PR calendars – companies promote new offerings in the Spring – there’s more than that going on. The range of design patterns that fall under this large umbrella are genuinely on the increase in a wider range of usage scenarios, driving continuing innovation from both technology providers and users. In part because of the frequent use of open source technology such as Apache Hadoop to implement “Big Data,” this is the type of innovation the industry most needs at this early stage of the market. A few key data points: