New-Tech Europe | November 2016 | Digital edition

The xPaaS Revolution and the Rise of BizDevOps

Mike Piech, Red Hat

developers create applications and IT operations professionals manage them. But enterprise IT is only starting to experience the xPaaS revolution's most surprising and exciting consequence as line of business managers become more closely involved in the software development process than ever before. The rise of "BizDevOps" is leading not only to tighter collaboration between IT departments and business managers, but also to heightened expectations, with businesses increasingly relying on technology to carve out unique competitive advantages. Accelerating time to market Onemajor benefit of xPaaS is accelerating applications' time to market. Innovation demands the ability to experiment, fail fast, and deliver before the competition. Developers must be free to focus on their applications, unhampered by the need to provision, configure, and secure their application infrastructure. IT operations can't take on even more maintenance responsibilities,

especially when many stacks deployed for the sake of rapid innovation may be extremely short lived. Architects need to provide an environment that maximizes productivity, minimizes cost and risk, and scales rapidly and securely. The last generation of application platforms, integration buses, and process automation suites, while an improvement over earlier home-grown solutions, fell short of delivering critical functionality on-demand without the need to acquire, provision, and maintain application infrastructure. xPaaS automates tedious tasks like setup, configuration, and integration. Traditionally, developers performed each of these functions for each middleware product manually—a time- consuming, error-prone process. To communicate with the database, for example, developers needed to obtain a connection string in one place and input it into a configuration file somewhere else. With xPaaS, intuitive menus help developers select their database and get their systems up and running quickly.

Platform-as-a-service, or PaaS, is an increasingly popular cloud offering that enables developers and IT operations professionals to build and maintain applications while avoiding many infrastructure-related challenges and expenses. According to a 2014 IDC report, the global PaaS market is expected to reach $20.3 billion in 2018 as enterprises continue to adopt this new technology. Playing on “PaaS,” Gartner coined the term xPaaS in 2013 to describe the broad spectrum of specialized middleware products that IT vendors offer as services, like integration Platform- as-a-service (iPaaS) or business process management Platform-as-a- service (bpmPaaS). xPaaS seizes the opportunity cloud computing provides to reimagine application development and operations, making these processes faster, easier, less risky, and more flexible. Middleware meeting the cloud has facilitated the DevOps movement and predictably transformed how

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