Explaining Platform as a Service – Part 2

In my last post, I discussed the business rationale behind one of the key tenets of cloud computing – Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS.  Services such as Amazon.com’s EC2 enable startups to avoid all the painful, costly and time-consuming efforts of setting up a data center infrastructure.  With IaaS new companies do not need to invest as much in capital expenditures for hardware and software.  Furthermore, startups can get to market faster by avoiding the trial-and-error learning process necessary to build a secure, high-performance web platform.  But while IaaS is compelling it is in many respects incomplete.

Explaining Platform-as-a-Service to Business Executives

Everyone is talking about cloud computing these days.  As a spokesperson at a technology firm I am often asked to my opinion of the various models by employees, journalists and customers.  Perhaps the most confusing concept in the area of cloud computing is Platform as a Service or PaaS.  I recently completed reading Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud, which offers excellent insights into one of the industry’s best known PaaS offerings – Force.com.  Benioff provided the best explanation I have heard for the rationale for PaaS.  In recent weeks I have been testing out a new explanation of PaaS based upon Benioff’s principles, but with an expanded version of the story.  Rather than focusing on APIs and development languages I have been taking the approach of explaining the business value of PaaS – specifically from the perspective of a startup.

Marketing Lessons from Salesforce.com

Over the holidays I had the opportunity to read Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud. The book covers a wide range of topics from company culture and funding strategies to sales models and corporate philanthropy. However, I was surprised at how many great ideas the book contained about marketing, public relations, pricing and product development. Below is a list of the 10 approaches of Salesforce.com that I thought were most compelling. But I would encourage to you read the entire book. I was aware of many of Salesforce’s marketing tactics over the past few years, but Benioff’s book ties all the ideas together into a cohesive strategy that is extremely inspiring.