A recent Gartner report identified PaaS as one of the most hyped cloud terms. Gartner goes on to say, "The term is hyped, though, because of the breadth of vendors looking to tap into the space, and the potential for the services that could be included in the PaaS layer, ranging from applications development to integration, business process management, database management and messaging. But in the early stages of the industry few vendors offer those spectrum of services."

Cutting through the hype, for Intel IT - Intel's internal managing and standardizing IT organization, PaaS is simply a pre-provisioned environment that consists of an OS, abstracted middleware, and infrastructure (compute, storage, networking) to build and rapidly host custom applications in the cloud. Developers continue to code their applications using common programming languages and development frameworks. Developers do not need an installation kit. Nor do they have to order and configure servers or VMs, and they don't have to copy files from one server to another. The application is pushed to the cloud from a command line interface or directly from an interactive development environment using a plug-in. The application is then hosted in a runtime container that matches the application's resource requirements. The platform also provides elastic scaling, high availability, automatic configuration, load balancing, and management tools.

For Intel IT, we recently conducted a very successful POC that demonstrated that our PaaS solution accelerated time to market for new custom applications and furthered the development of more cloud-aware applications that support our hybrid cloud vision. Some of the more tangible benefits included:

- Streamlining the path to production by removing IT processes from the critical path
- Abstract infrastructure details so developers can focus on code development
- Further standardize application stacks and business processes
- Improved resource utilization by enabling self-service, on-demand scalability
- Facilitates the creation of cloud-aware apps through templates, resource sharing, reusable web services, and large-scale multi-tenancy.
- Enhance security and business continuity

Ajay Chandramouly has over 13 years of experience in the technology industry. Ajay has held a variety of IT, software and hardware engineering positions while at Intel and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Ajay has spoken at numerous forums worldwide including Computer World's Storage Networking World and the National Defense Industrial Association. Ajay holds both an MBA and MSE from UC Davis.

The above insights were provided to InformationWeek by Intel Corporation as part of a sponsored content program. The information and opinions expressed in this content are those of Intel Corporation and its partners and not InformationWeek or its parent, UBM TechWeb.