OutSystems Opens Up PaaS to Public Clouds

Debunking Five Misconceptions About Cloud-Based Services

OutSystems has become the latest provider of a platform as a service (PaaS) offering that is blurring the line between public and private cloud computing.

As the provider of a PaaS environment for both Java and Microsoft.Net applications, OutSystems announced that it is making its namesake PaaS offering available on public clouds.

David Holmes, vice president of worldwide marketing for OutSystems, says the goal is to allow organizations to easily federate the development and deployment of applications across on-premise and public instances of cloud computing.

What distinguishes OutSystems in that scenario, says Holmes is that its PaaS environment includes a full suite of DevOps tools for managing the extended environment. Rather than thinking of DevOps as a separate product category, Holmes says it’s clear that the management of the underlying infrastructure needs to be tightly integrated with the applications that run on top of it.

As IT organizations consider their PaaS options, Holmes says OutSystems is betting that the environment that makes it easier to deploy and manage standard Java and Microsoft.net applications is going to win the day in the enterprise.

While infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provides IT organizations with some interesting outsourcing options, PaaS environments provide software needed to actually build and manage cloud applications. As enterprise IT organizations make the shift to the cloud, many of them are discovering that having access to another stack of infrastructure isn’t enough; they need a fully integrated PaaS environment to first build and, in the case of OutSystems, actually manage it.

The degree to which PaaS will drive the future of cloud computing is still a matter of debate, but in almost every case, the journey will ultimately end in a PaaS environment.