PaaS Business Plan

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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 “PaaS-
onomics” 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] 4

Section 2: Problem Identification 6

Section 3: Opportunity Assessment 7

Section 4: Potential Challenges 8

Section 6: Business Plan Approval 10

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PaaS Business Plan
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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
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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.
Need to support growth and
new initiatives.
Problem 3
Problem 4
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:
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 on-
demand capacity available immediately as needed.
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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 Moving our development efforts to the cloud means we do not have to
Reduction purchase new resources in order to develop and deploy new applications. 
Reduced administrative overhead associated with acquiring and managing
IT Efficiency resources as they will be hosted by an external third party. 
Reducing the amount of hardware we support in-house will enable better
energy efficiency, lower heat production, and a smaller physical footprint
Environmental which leads to savings in:
 Power consumption

 Facilities costs for cooling
Quality By consolidating on one platform and one provider, we can enable
Consistency 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
Proprietary platforms and
vendor lock-in
Data integration between
applications and services
Loss of control of
ownership
Loss of mobility and
flexibility for the coder
Challenge 5
Challenge 6
Description
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.
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.
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
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.
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Mitigation
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.
Again, using Salesforce, integration
on the Force.com platform mitigates
this challenge.
This can be mitigated by establishing
working expectations around
processes and methodologies.
Again, developing expectations and
addressing issues of morale that
may arise will be key.
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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
$0 $12580
Instances

1GB of unstructured data per

$0 $11
instance (@ $0.15/month/GB)

Data Transfer (5GB in/hr @ $0.10 and

$0 $17472
10GB out/hr @ $0.15)

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

_____________________________________________________

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