INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business
The xPaaS revolution and
the rise of BizDevOps
P
latform-as-a-service, or PaaS, is
an increasingly popular cloud
offering that enables developers
and IT operations professionals to
build and maintain applications while
avoiding many infrastructure-related
challenges and expenses. According
to a 2014 IDC report, the global PaaS
market is expected to reach $20.3 billion
in 2018 as enterprises continue to adopt
this new technology, writes Mike Piech,
vice president and general manager,
Middleware, Red Hat.
Playing on “PaaS,” Gartner coined
the term xPaaS in 2013 to describe
the broad spectrum of specialised
middleware products that IT vendors
offer as services, like integration
Platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) or business
process management Platform-as-a-
service (bpmPaaS). xPaaS seizes the
opportunity cloud computing provides
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to reimagine application development
and operations, making these processes
faster, easier, less risky, and more
flexible.
Middleware meeting the cloud has
facilitated the DevOps movement
and predictably transformed how
developers create applications and IT
operations professionals manage them.
But enterprise IT is only starting to
experience the xPaaS revolution’s most
surprising and exciting consequence
as line of business managers become
more closely involved in the software
development process than ever before.
The rise of “BizDevOps” is leading not
only to tighter collaboration between IT
departments and business managers,
but also to heightened expectations,
with businesses increasingly relying
on technology to carve out unique
competitive advantages.
Accelerating time to market
One major benefit of xPaaS is
accelerating applications’ time to
market. Innovation demands the
ability to experiment, fail fast, and
deliver before the competition.
Developers must be free to focus
on their applications, unhampered
by the need to provision, configure,
and secure their application
infrastructure. IT operations can’t
take on even more maintenance
responsibilities, especially when
many stacks deployed for the sake of
rapid innovation may be extremely
short lived. Architects need to provide
an environment that maximises
productivity, minimises cost and risk,
and scales rapidly and securely.
The last generation of application
platforms, integration buses, and
process automation suites, while an
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