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All "Platforms" Are Not Created Equal ©2016 Kahua. All Rights Reserved Kahua: Reinventing Project Management & Collaboration A Walk Down Memory Lane During the dot.com days of the late 90's, when demand for web-based applications and services was on the rise, many software vendors began to claim their solutions were Internet-based when in reality most were merely web-enabled. While the distinction may appear subtle, the industry quickly discovered that many of those other systems were older generation LAN- based solutions simply retrofitted to function over the internet. Fast Forward to 2016 Today we see that history has a funny way of repeating itself in the Platform as a Service (PaaS) market. According to a recent report by IT Market Research, the PaaS market is expected to reach $6.94 billion by 2018; so with demand on the rise, we see that many vendors are claiming their solutions are a PaaS when in reality, they are not. So much like the mid-to late 90's when the differences between an Internet-based and web-enabled applications weren't always discernable, such is the case today with PaaS. PaaS provides a platform to develop, run, and manage web applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an application. With PaaS, an organization has a lot more freedom and less dependence on their vendor to provide the customization that best suits that organization's needs. Like the older LAN based applications masquerading as Internet-based, many so-called PaaS solutions today are really just older Software as a Service(SaaS) technologies, i.e., "What you see is what you get" and you are more dependent on the vendor than you might've been lead to believe. E X E C U T I V E B R I E F

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