Are VMware and Microsoft missing the boat on private PaaS?

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure are two of the leading platform as a service (PaaS) offerings from two cloud heavyweights, but one consultant says both companies are largely ignoring the private cloud market, creating a glaring hole for customers. John Treadway, a VP at Boston-area consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, says VMware and Microsoft are holding back the entire PaaS industry by not offering commercial support for on-premise installations of the their platforms.

"I spend a lot of time with large enterprises, and we’re very big proponents of the PaaS opportunity," he says, but many customers are not willing to put resources in a public cloud, off their own premise, he says. Businesses and IT shops want to control these deployments behind their own firewall. "They want to run their own internal clouds," and VMware and Microsoft don’t have the tools to do that for Cloud Foundry and Azure, he says…

Part of this could be the immaturity of the overall PaaS market: Garnter recently reported that the $1.2 billion PaaS market is 8 percent the size of the $14.4 billion software as a service (SaaS) market in terms of IT spending. But Treadway says more customers would be open to using PaaS if companies like VMware and Microsoft offered private, on-premise versions of these services.

Cloud Foundry (CF) is VMware’s open source PaaS environment, which has been used by a variety of service providers to build a PaaS deployment. VMware offers a hosted version of Cloud Foundry, but the company does not have a supported version that can be deployed on the customer’s premise…

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