Several sessions were devoted to PaaS [platform as a service]. This form of cloud computing has been the ignored stepsister of the more widely adopted IaaS and SaaS, but that is changing fast. At HyperStratus, we have concluded that PaaS will be the form mainstream IT organizations will ultimately use to implement elastic applications. This is because most enterprise developers will find designing applications that interact directly with low-level infrastructure resources too difficult. Leveraging PaaS frameworks will allow enterprise developers to focus on business logic while automatically achieving cloud computing's scalability and elasticity. Fittingly, there were a number of different PaaS offerings discussed, and one PaaS startup, dotcloud, won the Structure Launchpad competition.

I had the privilege of moderating a . The rise of external services that can be called by applications is exploding, and this presents a number of implications. First, it provides a way to improve developer productivity by reducing the need to develop so much of an application. If an external service is used to provide some set of functionality or data, that is less work for the application developer, who is then freed to work on the areas of the application unavailable as standardized services. In other words, the developer can work on the differentiating aspects of the application, which is where business value for the sponsoring company lives.

Second, APIs provide a way for companies to realize revenues by offering interfaces to their systems, enabling unrelated web applications to generate transactions for the companies without the end user even realizing what is going on. Sears was cited as an example of this: By providing an API, the retailer allows external sites to sell the vast spread of merchandise Sears offers, and perhaps offers a way for a troubled retailer to find a new source of revenues. To provide a perspective on how pervasive API calls can be within applications, in another presentation someone from Salesforce said that of its 500 million daily page views, fully 50 percent of them are served up through the Salesforce API.