It’s time for CIOs to abandon fear and embrace PaaS solutions
April 9, 2013
Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.
Mario Cruz understands an enterprise CIO’s reluctance to embrace Platform as a Service (PaaS). He used to be one of them. During his more than 20 years in IT, including eight years as CIO of Chicago-based Rewards Network Inc., he’s been around a few traditional data centers and the keeper of many legacy systems.
Now as the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of startup Choose Digital, Cruz has harnessed his business to the cloud. He and partner Stephen Humphreys founded the company in early 2011 as a "white label" alternative to iTunes. In essence, Choose Digital is a digital supply chain for music, movies, TV shows, books and games. Their customers, which include United Airlines and Marriott, use Choose Digital’s system to render digital rewards for their respective customer loyalty programs while keeping their own branding and controlling their own user data…
For a startup company with big ambitions, Platform as a Service, which allows users to rent virtualized hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet, was a good fit, Cruz said. The service delivery model allows Choose Digital to rent virtualized servers and associated services for running existing applications and — critical to its success — to rapidly develop and test new applications. "Our goal was to build an API that created a digital supply chain for any company to use and PaaS was perfect for that," Cruz said. "We had decided early on that if a service wasn’t core to our business, we’d rather have someone else manage it, and with PaaS we knew it was going to be more secure, faster and usually cheaper, three things we wouldn’t get internally."…
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