Published on the 25/07/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Linux house Red Hat is readying a public cloud version of its Platform as a Service for New Zealand organisations keen to dial up tools to allow them to develop, test and deploy bespoke software…
Red Hat has already sold its Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution to organisations to APAC businesses in the finance, retail and IT sectors, albeit a version running on users’ own infrastructure, and is now planning a public cloud version of the system, which is intended to allow organisations to rapidly self service and provision tools for bespoke applications development, testing and deployment. However Red Hat has yet to provide any guidance as to when that public version of the service might be available in New Zealand (it was launched in the northern hemisphere in June).
Organisations that can’t wait are already able to access Red Hat’s alternative open source PaaS from Openshift.com, although that service does not offer any specific service level assurances, which might be important for organisations keen to deploy enterprise-grade bespoke applications using a PaaS.
Ben Henshall, manager of middleware for Red Hat in Australia and New Zealand, was not able to say when the public cloud version of the fully supported Red Hat PaaS might be launched in Australia and New Zealand, but forecast rapid growth in the PaaS market overall as organisations sought more flexibility and agility in terms of software development and deployment.
While he acknowledged that PaaS was in its “infancy” compared to more established cloud services such as infrastructure, or software, sold as a service, he cited IDC statistics which suggested demand was rising to the extent that the 100 vendors which occupied the PaaS market sector in 2012 would increase ten-fold by 2016.
Henshall said that PaaS had the capacity to, “change the way IT provisions to business in a more expedient fashion”. By lowering the hurdles in terms of time and cost to set up a development environment, organisations would be able to provide access to software development and deployment tools “in minutes,” thanks to Red Hat’s subscription model, he claimed.
Unlike IaaS and SaaS which are increasingly sold directly into lines of business by cloud service providers, Henshall said that PaaS remained largely a proposition for the technical side of organisations.
