SAAS over PAAS over IAAS over my own data centre

This is a headline from a quote which came from my friend, a C-level executive in one of the biggest corporations in Finland. You might wonder why, as a representative of a company that doesn’t particularly preach cloud*, and doesn’t provide a full set of services for managing key SaaS components like ERPs or CRMs, I would bring up the topic. Naturally, I want to talk about the role of custom-built software running on PaaS. I agree that when SaaS does the trick, you should choose it over a custom PaaS-application.

Let’s start with the easy part: Why is PaaS superior to IaaS?

There are a number of reasons:

Capacity is dirt cheap
Labour is expensive
Capacity is getting cheaper rapidly
Labour costs are increasing.

You should focus on saving labour, and this is fundamentally what using PaaS means. Your software development projects will ultimately end up costing less. Finding the cheapest possible capacity should save you a couple of hundred euros/pounds/dollars per month. On the other hand, finding the most efficient development platform saves you months in development costs and crucially, in time to market. You might find this irrelevant if you want to use SaaS for everything, but unfortunately, you can’t. There might be a service for each of your needs, but how are you going to win overall in the marketplace? Every company today runs their business processes digitally. When you use SaaS, you’re essentially using the process the vendor has defined, which in a lot of cases are world-class. Using these processes ensures you’re competitive, but by definition, they are not unique and you can’t build competitive advantage with them. When you look at your strategy and understand how are you going to be different from your competitors, you’ll understand when and where you’re going to need PaaS. For me, this makes PaaS somewhat superior to SaaS. The things we develop run at the core of our customers’ strategy. We make a real impact. Ultimately, a partner such as Nordcloud will help you win.

* There’s enough market demand with the believers to spend time on educating the non-believers (!)