Enterprise cloud software powerhouse Salesforce has introduced a set of new handy mobile-centric services for developers using Heroku and Force.com, the two platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers under the Salesforce Platform banner.

The huge growth opportunities for PaaS providers like Force.com and Heroku and the muscular rise of native mobile apps are no doubt pushing Salesforce to reach out more frequently than ever to developers who might use its platform services and build for mobile. Salesforce already places a heavy emphasis on mobile apps and mobile access to Salesforce data, but this new move powers up its tools focused on enterprise developers.

First up, Salesforce now offers open-source “packs” that are designed to let JavaScript web developers build HTML5 or hybrid mobile apps. These packs give devs access to Salesforce Platform “REST APIs” through three JavaScript frameworks: AngularJS, Backbone.js, and jQuery Mobile. Ideally, it makes a web developers’ life easier if he or she wants to develop on mobile as well.

“These are millions of JavaScript developers out there,” Salesforce Platform VP Scott Holden told VentureBeat. “We want these folks to build mobile apps — specifically ones that access Salesforce data.”

Second, Salesforce has revamped its mobile SDK to version 2.0. The open-source SDK makes it easier for enterprise-focused developers to connect Salesforce data to iOS and Android mobile apps regardless if those apps are built natively, hybrid, or HTML5. The SDK also helps give devs access to geolocation data and a smartphone’s camera so employers or enterprise app makers want to add a location data layer or have the app take pictures. Additionally, the SDK has libraries for things like secure offline storage and authentication.

The SDK update is focused on Force.com users rather than Heroku users, but the packs could be used for either set. Holden said the number of developers using the two PaaS providers is about evenly split, although Heroku hosts many more apps than Force.com.

On a final note, Salesforce is doing more two things outside of new products to reach out to enterprise developers. First, it is opening up what it dubs the “Salesforce Mobile Accelerator Program,” which will “provide training and best practices on reference architectures, mobile architect curriculum, and consultant certification.” The program counts companies including Appirio, Bluewolf, Deloitte Consulting, and Detroit Labs as partners.

Salesforce’s developer community will also host a series of events during the week of April 22 to give hands-on time with the latest Salesforce mobile services for developers, including the new SDK and the open-source packs.

Top photo via Salesforce

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The little-known company that provides high-end revenue lifecycle management software for Twitter and Facebook is now offering the same technology for the little guy.

Today Revstream, which already processes over $25 billion in annual revenues for Twitter, Facebook, Activision, and VMware, among other companies, announced that it is releasing a version of its software on Force.com. The new cloud-based app will allow startups and growing businesses to manage their revenue, stay standards-compliant, and forecast future earnings.

In case you’re wondering, revenue management is not exactly page-turning stuff — perhaps unless you’re an accountant — but it is a potential life-saver.

Why?

Revenue management and recognition is increasingly difficult, with simple sales being replaced by subscriptions, upgrades, downgrades, bundles, and delayed revenue recognition deals. At the same time, regulatory requirements from the SEC, GAAP rules, and Sarbanes Oxley have greatly increased the complexity around revenue recognition issues.

“We were formed to help solve the problem of revenue management and revenue recognition,” Revstream CEO Rajiv Chopra told me last week. “It’s a problem because the way companies are built and the way revenue is recorded are not in sync.

A decade ago the problem only affected a portion of your business, he said.  But now, with the explosion of cloud services and the incredible profusion of ad-supported businesses … 100 percent of many companies’ revenue is under scrutiny.

Revstream, which integrates into a company’s billing systems with a very high degree of automation, essentially guarantees that your revenue recognition, income forecasts, and lifetime value of customer projections are standards and regulations-compliant. That’s important for companies who are planning to IPO, startups that might eventually be acquired, or even startups that are planning a follow-on round of financing.

“We decided that small companies and pre-IPO companies needed this,” Chopra said. “So we packaged it into a software-as-a-service solution on Force.com so we can deliver it in the cloud. In a nutshell, it brings the same compliance at a much lower price point.”

That high degree of automation which is important for enterprise customers is even more important for small customers, Chopra told me. The same is true for ease of integration, which can hinder acceptance or use of a new software capability. That’s why the company built the cloud version on Force.com … which bakes in both automation and integration right from the start.

“Most customers we talk to already have a billing system … it’s called a website,” said Chopra with tongue somewhere in the vicinity of his cheek. “They don’t need an ERP system, they just need a revenue management system.”

Early customer My Life, which helps 60 million users manage their social networks, is a believer:

“Revstream Cloud provides the key capabilities and scale that subscription businesses need to efficiently automate and manage recurring revenues,” CFO Peter Oey said in a statement.

photo credit: peasap via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Platform-as-a-Service is part of the booming cloud computing sector, one area of the cloud that some analysts, companies, and developers have overlooked. But recent research shows that PaaS is no longer the ugly duckling of the cloud industry — and that it’s ready to grow quite a bit during the next few years.

PaaS will make up barely 1 percent of the overall $109 billion cloud industry this year. But it will likely grow more than 30 percent annually over the next four years, according to research firm Gartner.

This could make PaaS a $2.9 billion market by 2016, or more than 2 percent of the $209 billion total cloud market. While small, it’s the second fastest growing “layer” of the cloud and one that cloud-watchers should be paying closer attention to.

What is PaaS?

Like many things dubbed cloud, PaaS is a term that sometimes get lost in technobabble or marketing jargon. So let’s break down what PaaS actually is.

The cloud features four main layers, according to Gartner: Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, and Business Process-as-a-Service (IaaS, Paas, SaaS, and BPaaS,).

IaaS companies such as Amazon, Rackspace, SoftLayer, and Joyent offer the core infrastructure and virtual servers that host applications and data. This is where the heavy iron sits, such as storage, servers, and so on. The SaaS category, meanwhile, lies on the opposite end: It includes applications that companies deliver exclusively via the web (rather than desktop apps). These include apps such as Google Docs, Salesforce CRM, Workday, Box, Taleo, and NetSuite that enterprise workers rely on. BPaaS includes business process services like advertising or payments.

PaaS sits in-between IaaS and SaaS, providing an environment for developers and companies to host and deploy applications more easily. Simply put, PaaS companies shield developers from the hassle of setting up, configuring, and managing things like servers and databases, so that they don’t have to see the infrastructure side.

What makes PaaS so attractive is that it can improve the speed of developing an app, save you money, and maybe most important, let you focus on innovating your application and business. Major PaaS providers include Salesforce (Heroku), Google (App Engine), and Microsoft (Azure).

In the diagram below, you can see how PaaS fits into the main layers of the cloud:

Boom time

In terms of size, SaaS, IaaS, and BPaaS far outstrip PaaS. In 2012, PaaS revenues ($1.2 billion) will be a tenth of the size of SaaS ($14.4 billion), a fifth of IaaS ($6.2 billion), and just a tiny fraction of BPaaS ($84.1 billion).

However, when it comes to year-over-year growth of the PaaS segment itself, it looks quite nice.

Research firm IDC breaks down the market slightly differently than Gartner and is more bullish on PaaS. It estimates that the worldwide public PaaS market will grow from $2.6 billion in 2011 to $9.8 billion in 2016. That represents 30.9 percent annualized growth.

By 2016, IDC believes public PaaS will account for 8.5 percent of overall app dev and deployment revenue, with “strong growth” occurring in every region of the world. Stephen Hendrick, IDC group vice president for application development and deployment research, calls PaaS’ future “exciting.”

Just this week, Salesforce COO George Hu said at DEMO Fall 2012 that its platform services have surpassed Salesforce’s CRM in terms of API calls per day. “The pace keeps me up at night,” he said. “Things are moving incredibly fast at Salesforce right now.”

Additionally, a recent survey by smaller PaaS provider Engine Yard, which had $28 million in revenue last year, indicates that PaaS adoption is on the rise with medium and large companies. Two out of three survey respondents said they already use or plan to use PaaS in the next two years. “Enterprise is beginning to bite,” Mark Gaydos, the Engine Yard SVP of marketing, told us at the time.

For more on how the market is growing, take a look at some of the biggest players:

Heroku

One of the largest players in the PaaS marketplace is Salesforce with Heroku, which has more than 2.3 million apps currently deployed on it. A year ago it had just 200,000. Heroku customers include Walmart, Macy’s, Activision Blizzard, and GroupMe.

“We see PaaS as a fundamental game changer,” Heroku chief operating officer Oren Teich told VentureBeat. “We’re looking at the base of innovation. We’ve only climbed 100 feet of a 3-mile-high mountain.”

Teich said he expects Heroku to host more than five million apps a year from now. He admits that he’s being cautious with that number and said it could potentially be more akin to six million or seven million apps if momentum really picks up. Salesforce would not reveal the revenue it generates from Heroku.

Google App Engine

Google and its App Engine is one of the earliest players in PaaS, opening its doors in “preview status” in April 2008 and officially leaving preview in November 2011.

Here, too, Google does not break down revenue it gets from App Engine. However, Google’s statistics show that usage of App Engine is growing quickly. At the Google I/O conference this past June, Google announced that it had more than 1 million active apps deployed on GAE and 250,000 active developers building on the platform. In May 2011, Google said it had 200,000 active apps and 100,000 active developers.

Half of the Internet’s IP addresses touch Google App Engine servers each week, a Google spokesperson recently told me. Some two trillion datastore operations are performed on it each month.

Microsoft Windows Azure

Thirdly, we have Microsoft and Windows Azure. Azure turned some heads in June by also starting to offer developers IaaS on top of its already strong PaaS product.

Steven Martin, the general manager of Azure’s operations team, told us that Azure has “tens of thousands” of customers and that Azure has doubled the number of its customers over the past 12 months. He said Microsoft has doubled compute capacity for Azure so it can meet demand and that Azure users are consuming more compute capacity than the world used in 1998.

“We’ve worked hard to keep up with demand the past two years,” Martin told us. “In the long term, PaaS will be most widely used for application development.”

Other players

The PaaS market also encompasses a number of smaller players, such as VMWare’s Cloud Foundry, AppFog, dotCloud, CloudBees, Engine Yard, Red Hat’s OpenShift, and Salesforce’s enterprise-oriented platform, Force.com.

AppFog has more than 60,000 apps hosted, up from 50,000 apps a month ago and 10,000 apps a year ago, according to AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson. AppFog also recently acquired Nodester, a PaaS that supports the popular Node.js programming environment.

Developers take control

The prospects for PaaS weren’t always so exciting. Redmonk analyst Steve O’Grady says that the earliest PaaS implementations — Salesforce’s Force.com, Google App Engine, Microsoft’s Azure — did not sell as well as the market expected.

“From an adoption standpoint, early PaaS largely failed,” O’Grady said. “Did Force.com and Google get users? Yes, but they did not live up to expectations.”

That said, a few barriers were stopping the mass market from buying in. First, many large enterprise companies don’t permit PaaS use. AppFog’s Carlson says that CIOs are often concerned about vendor lock-in and don’t like PaaS providers taking over functions the company could potentially set up on its own.

But developers go around their IT overlords and use PaaS services anyway. Because much of the technology is low-cost or open-source, developers say “screw it” because PaaS greatly improves their productivity and lowers project costs.

O’Grady says what the CIOs want doesn’t matter now that their developers have taken control. “They don’t have a choice,” he said.

The second barrier to Paas adoption? Not enough people know what PaaS can help their company accomplish. Heroku’s Teich said when he talks to developers and enterprises about PaaS, they don’t do much evaluation of their options or even know what the options are. Basically, they are woefully uneducated.

“Developers have a lot of preconceived notions about which PaaS they should use,” Teich said. “It’s another sign that PaaS is something that has a lot of growth potential.”

If you feel like you need a PaaS education, come join us for the CloudBeat 2012 conference on Nov. 28 and 29 in Redwood City, Calif. We look forward to seeing you there.

Clouds photo via Nicholas A. Tonelli/Flickr

Cloud breakdown slide via “Windows Azure Platform: Cloud Development Jump Start” via Microsoft

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The market for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) companies will grow steadily in the next several years because of the potential for operational improvement and cost reduction, according to a just-released survey by Engine Yard.

Engine Yard competes heavily with Salesforce’s Force.com and Microsoft’s Azure to attract developers and companies to its platform-as-a-service. While Engine Yard does have a clear interest to say that the PaaS market will grow swiftly, it also has some authority in being a quickly growing PaaS startup that generated $28 million in revenue last year.

Mark Gaydos, Engine Yard’s SVP of marketing, told us that the biggest change in the market lately is that “enterprise is beginning to bite.” The many medium- and large-sized businesses investing in cloud services create an opening for PaaS companies, which deploy and host applications. (Click here to see what IaaS, PaaS and SaaS companies do.)

“It appears that most companies are looking to engage with the cloud to deploy more innovative customer-facing applications, such as SaaS, mobile, e-commerce, and social across a wide variety of languages,” the company writes in the conclusion of the survey. “While cost savings is a reason to consider using a PaaS, the desire to improve operational readiness and improve application functionality and uptime are more important to individuals responding to the survey.”

Check out the infographic below to see the major take-aways from the survey:

Top photo credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock

ServiceMax

The company offers customers Web-based applications that help to facilitate things like scheduling and workforce optimization, parts logistics and contract management. For example, a business with a mobile workforce can use ServiceMax to process works orders in the field and automatically invoice the customer instantly.

The service is available on any device that can access the web including laptops, netbooks, and tablets. Specific applications exist for BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices. Most recently, the company’s iPad app was a winner of the 2011 Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) Vision Award in the Commercial category.

The tool is built on Force.com, Salesforce.com’s cloud based service, and has also gained the company’s financial support, participating in both rounds of funding.

The Pleasanton, California-based company, founded in 1999, secured the latest round of funding from Mayfield Fund, along with Emergence Capital, Trinity Ventures, and Salesforce.com. The company claims several large customers including DuPont, Electrolux and Pentair.