I'm back from the Web 2.0 Expo, actually got back Saturday morning. Meant to post a quick summary blog on Friday, but felt a bit under the weather which I found is twice as worse when taking the overnight flight. However, things are back to normal on this Monday morning. Okay, back to business. While the Web 2.0 Expo is very eclectic, from social networking, to MP3 to text, to Web devices, what was core to the I’m back from the Web 2.0 Expo, actually got back Saturday morning. Meant to post a quick summary blog on Friday, but felt a bit under the weather which I found is twice as worse when taking the overnight flight. However, things are back to normal on this Monday morning. Okay, back to business. While the Web 2.0 Expo is very eclectic, from social networking, to MP3 to text, to Web devices, what was core to the show this year was the number of platform-as-a-service, or PaaS providers that have come onto the scene. We know the larger ones already, including Salesforce.com’s Force, Google’s App Engine, Microsoft Mesh, and even Yahoo is now in the act with their new PaaS offering. However, there are a few key new players that I saw as well including CogHead and BungeeLabs. The idea is simple, really. Instead of having a ton of on-premise infrastructure to support development, you leverage a complete platform, including application design, application development, application testing, and application hosting, as a service. Thus, you don’t have buy hardware and software, you simple subscribe to a PaaS, typically for pennies a minute. Thus, you’re able to build, test, and deploy some pretty amazing applications and/or services for a fraction of the cost than having the platform sitting the data center. That’s the value. We’ve been talking about PaaS, and its use in the world of SOA/WOA a lot in the last couple of weeks as changing the game. Not really changing the design patterns of SOA mind you, just the location for building, testing, and deployment, for some things, as well as simplicity and speed of the architecture build out. Indeed, it’s still about architecture. Architecture is a constant while technology always changes. This is not about a new “save the world” concept, but just an extension of the current thinking and a reaction to emerging technology practices…outsourcing of core business processes to Web-based computing. What you need to understand about this “paradigm shift” is that it’s no shift at all. We’ve been outsourcing major business processes for years, it has just been very difficult to do so. However, with the number of PaaS providers all fighting it out in this emerging space, you can count on some pretty impressive stuff emerging in the next few years. This assists those building SOAs/WOAs since they will have a choice as to where to host these processes/services, within or outside of the firewall. The fact of the matter is that many will select the PaaS path since the cost and the speed-to-deployment are too attractive to pass up. The value proposition of a PaaS is not simply the cost and the speed, it’s the number of resources on the platform of the Web that you’re able to leverage. Data-as-a-service for instance, available through remote Web services, visual APIs from mapping to commerce, and even other PaaS providers that will allow you to mix and match the platform that’s right for your application. PaaS is going to have a good run, and we’re at the starting line now. Software Development