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PaaS Business Plan ITA – Premium: Strategize Tool

PaaS Business Plan Introduction: How to Use This Template This template will help build a Platform as a Service (PaaS) business plan for the enterprise as well as document business justifications and cautions for developing on the cloud. The goal is to ensure that a comprehensive corporate strategy begins to be defined. The resulting document is therefore intended for both initial project scoping and for reuse for future projects.

Guidelines for Preparation It is a good idea to do some scoping of possible PaaS strategies before doing this plan. Output charts from all tools can be used to illustrate points in the business plan whether for, or against. Some points to keep in mind: 

PaaS is still a very nascent market, so if the business case doesn’t make sense this year, it may be worth another look next year to allow the technology and vendor offerings to mature.



There are different kinds of PaaS providers to consider: o

SaaS vendors. A PaaS offering such as Salesforce.com’s Force.com, extends the platform used by the SaaS vendor to additional tenants. The developer uses the vendor’s tools and frameworks to create their own applications.

o

Enterprise application PaaS provides enterprise-familiar languages and frameworks. For example, Windows Azure supports .NET while VMforce uses Java and the open source Spring framework.

o

Services for a platform. Services for developers offered by Infrastructure as a Service providers – for example, Amazon EC2 – are more services for a platform rather than platform as a service. Developers must still install their own programming framework and tools on the servers.



A good resource for general information on the economics of PaaS is LongJump’s white paper “PaaSonomics” which provides information on lowering costs and increasing the business value of IT via PaaS.



Also, be sure to use the Info-Tech “Cloud TCO Comparison Tool” and “PaaS Appropriateness Assessment Tool”.

Each section contains a description of what is intended to be delivered as well as example ideas in italics. Remember to delete this grey text in the final document.

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Table of Contents Executive Summary

3

Section 1: Application Development Strategic Assessment at [Company Name] Section 2: Problem Identification 6 Section 3: Opportunity Assessment Section 4: Potential Challenges

7

8

Section 6: Business Plan Approval

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Executive Summary The Executive Summary will be written after all other sections have been completed. It may be the only section an executive reads or its content and tone may determine whether the rest of the plan is read at all. Summarize each section into a concise set of statements and conclusions. Try to hook the reader so that they want to read each section in its entirety. Make sure that the project being proposed is clearly identified as a call to action at the end, intended to exploit the opportunities that have been strategized. End with a clear statement of what is needed from the reader to make it happen. Example: The strategic goal of application development should be to effectively meet business needs through rapid and efficient development and deployment of applications that serve the business. The end user is also a critical consideration for this strategy: to ensure that applications are being delivered on time, function in a meaningful and productive way, and can be rapidly improved based on feedback. Platform as a Service will allow us to achieve these goals more effectively and at a lower cost. 

The infrastructure cost savings potential of the cloud needs to be considered for our application development strategy. Rapid and flexible application development via PaaS could be critical to enabling an agile development strategy which allows us to focus on business logic and application improvement.



A PaaS strategy will also assist in lowering the cost of our agility goals and the cost of future growth and new initiatives.



Opportunities presented by cloud-based development include CapEx reduction, increased IT efficiency due to lower administrative overhead, a moderate decrease in facilities costs, and more consistent quality across applications for all users.



Potential challenges for a PaaS approach include vendor lock-in, integration, and loss of developer control and flexibility that may impact morale. However, plans to mitigate these challenges have been developed.

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Section 1: Application Development Strategic Assessment at [Company Name] This section of the PaaS Business Plan explains the strategic drivers at [company name]. In this section, it is important to draw upon several points:   

Define how a PaaS strategy relates to lowering costs and improving efficiency. The point here is to show that the cloud relates to an agile development strategy which has real business benefit. If possible, describe past efforts that have been accomplished to advance the goal of PaaS adoption. For example, list other cloud services being leveraged – Software as a Service – that would improve resource consistency. Provide evidence of general market trends to indicate that others are pursuing similar goals.

Text can be drawn from Info-Tech’s PaaS strategy storyboard to help make the case. For example: The goal of [company name] is to continue to drive toward an agile development strategy in order to efficiently and cost-effectively support mission-critical business applications. PaaS can break the bottleneck of infrastructure acquisition configuration and deployment for development projects. •

Physical infrastructure requirements for application development include Web servers, application servers, and database servers. This infrastructure costs time, capital, and administrative overhead.

•

In a PaaS scenario the development team can focus on the business logic of developing an application. The infrastructure to host and run the solution is simply there and will automatically scale with need.

•

With PaaS, an application goes rapidly from modeling to coding to push button deployment. This is ideal for a rapid develop and deploy strategy. Changes and additions to the application gleaned from user feedback and usage statistics can be quickly and automatically deployed to the end user.

n = 123 Source: Info-Tech Research Group Page 4 Info-Tech Research Group

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Both within IT and in the business as a whole, the potential the cloud offers to lower infrastructure costs, particularly upfront costs, is seen as the most positive attribute.

•

Second only to infrastructure costs, rapid and flexible application development and delivery was ranked as positive.

•

An agile development approach using PaaS and cloud application delivery promotes iterative development, push button delivery, automated user management and taking infrastructure provisioning and management off the table to allow for rapid deployment with no upfront infrastructure costs.

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Section 2: Problem Identification Use this section to describe the business challenges that PaaS is intended to solve.

Example:

Problem

Inability to affordably support an agile development strategy.

Details/Description The idea behind agile development is to deliver more narrowly scoped pieces of functionality more rapidly. It is an iterative process with a tight feedback loop. As each small application is deployed, feedback and use statistics are gathered to improve service and functionality of the next iteration. It has become a challenge to support this agility without having to spend more capital on required resources: more servers, more development tools, etc. It is taking longer to gain approval to roll out necessary changes to our users which impacts the performance and productivity of the applications we support. Business is currently experiencing significant growth. To meet current and future demand, we will need to be prepared for new initiatives. This will potentially impact our development environment in x ways:

Need to support growth and new initiatives.

1. New initiatives may require new enabling applications which will require additional processing and storage capacity as we grow, which translates into larger upfront capital costs. 2. By developing and deploying applications in the cloud, we will have ondemand capacity available immediately as needed.

Problem 3

Problem 4

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Section 3: Opportunity Assessment This section of the Server Acquisition Business Plan illustrates the opportunities that [company name] has to realize a return on investment in terms of both tangible and intangible benefits. The table is currently populated with an example.

Legend

  

Our organization has the opportunity to achieve this goal. Our organization may have an opportunity in this area. Further investigation with business units is recommended. Our organization will likely not benefit from investing resources into this area.

Domain

Opportunity

Rating

Capital Cost Reduction

Moving our development efforts to the cloud means we do not have to purchase new resources in order to develop and deploy new applications.

IT Efficiency

Reduced administrative overhead associated with acquiring and managing resources as they will be hosted by an external third party.

Environmental

Reducing the amount of hardware we support in-house will enable better energy efficiency, lower heat production, and a smaller physical footprint which leads to savings in:  Power consumption  Facilities costs for cooling



Quality Consistency

By consolidating on one platform and one provider, we can enable consistency in the quality and performance of the applications.



 

Domain 5



Domain 6



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Section 4: Potential Challenges PaaS, as with all things cloud-based, has its own challenges. It may be useful to include these challenges here in order to ensure readiness. Where possible, indicate that mitigation for a particular challenge has been thought out. For example:

Challenge

Description

Mitigation

Proprietary platforms and vendor lock-in

A proprietary language, such as Apex used by Force.com, makes code mobility almost impossible because the code simply cannot run anywhere else. Services that use .NET or Java are more open to mobility, but these too might have integrated data sources and libraries that could mean something important gets left behind.

Because we currently use Salesforce.com for our CRM application, developing on Force.com will not be a significant challenge. The development team is familiar with the Salesforce environment, and our end users are familiar with its interface.

Data integration between applications and services

Integration with existing data sources will be a challenge, particularly if the data is hosted internally and the application is being developed and hosted in the cloud.

Again, using Salesforce, integration on the Force.com platform mitigates this challenge.

Loss of control of ownership

Many developers want to have access to the entire development environment, from the application down to the bare metal. They are accountable for the functionality of the performance of the entire stack, so they want to be involved in building out the components and architecture

This can be mitigated by establishing working expectations around processes and methodologies.

Loss of mobility and flexibility for the coder

Development is, to a certain extent, a creative skill, and many developers want to have the freedom to do work on their own time or on their own machine.

Again, developing expectations and addressing issues of morale that may arise will be key.

Challenge 5 Challenge 6

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Section 5: Recommended Investment Include some details about the recommended purchase. Also include some comparative figures from the TCO Calculations

Costs

Initial Investment (CapEx)

Estimated Annual Cost

6 Windows Azure Medium Compute Instances

$0

$12580

1GB of unstructured data per instance (@ $0.15/month/GB)

$0

$11

Data Transfer (5GB in/hr @ $0.10 and 10GB out/hr @ $0.15)

$0

$17472

SQL Azure (10GB @ $99.99/month )

$0

$1200

Subtotal Annual Costs

$0

$31263

TCO Calculation Versus Similar Internal Development Strategy

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Section 6: Business Plan Approval Gain executive approval prior to moving to the next step of project planning.

________________________________________________________

_______________________________

Project Approver Signature

Date

________________________________________________________

_______________________________

Project Sponsor/Lead Signature

Date

________________________________________________________

______________________________

Project Manager Signature

Date

_____________________________________________________ Info-Tech Research Group tools and template documents are provided for the free and unrestricted use of subscribers to Info-Tech Research Group services. Use this document either in whole or in part as a basis and guide for document creation. To customize this document with corporate marks and titles, simply replace the InfoTech Information in the Header and Footer fields of this document.

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