The PaaS shakeup and what it means for OpenStack

The PaaS shakeup and what it means for OpenStack

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is hot! Why? Because the year started with a lot of link-bait articles declaring PaaS dead. That’s a clear sign, right? More seriously, the expected size of the public PaaS market will be $14 billion by 2017. That’s about 10 percent of the application development and deployment market, which means two things: PaaS is becoming significant and there still is plenty of room to grow. If this doesn’t.

The cloud landscape described, categorized, and compared

The cloud landscape described, categorized, and compared

“I work for a PaaS company” I answered him. “Ah, okay, great”, and he moved to another subject. It was a cold winter day on a hipster cloud conference. He wasn’t the only one that directly knew what my company did. Most people there knew the difference between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and therefore knew exactly what a PaaS company did, right? Well, not exactly… Nowadays, it’s.

Holiday: time to do some in-depth reading

10 reasons why you should organize a FedEx day

10 reasons why you should organize a FedEx day

As I briefly described in my tale of a 7 year journey in developing software for the enterprise, at Mendix every month we give employees the chance to work on anything they like and deliver it in 24 hours. We call these 24 hour hackathons “FedEx days”: build it and ship it in one day. We normally start on Thursdays at 4pm with a kickoff during which people will team up. Dinner.

Designing the next programming language? Understand how people learn!

Somehow it is a recurring theme in computer science: create a “programming” system that is easier to use and learn than the existing programming approaches. I am not just talking about better tools, like IDEs, but also new languages. It seems as if each self-respecting programmer creates his/her own language or tool-set nowadays, right? Okay, I have to admit that not all efforts are focused on making things easier, often.

A tale of a 7 year journey in developing software for the enterprise

Much is written about lean startups, agile software development, continuous integration or even continuous deployment. All with the goal to help us understand the dynamics of successful software companies and their development teams. I am inspired by these stories, they show me what the ideal situation is like, they challenge me to improve our current way of working. Today I want to give something back. I want to share with.

3 steps to free your business from the IT stranglehold (and vice versa)

3 steps to free your business from the IT stranglehold (and vice versa)

It’s not just IT that slows down the business. In a recent study 20% of companies reported they have NO innovation strategy and more than 50% of companies reported that their innovation strategy was mis-aligned with their business strategy and that their culture poorly supported it [1]. However, if we look at the IT side of an organization we often see the same kind of figures: 70% – 80% of.

The Evolution of PaaS in the Enterprise

The Evolution of PaaS in the Enterprise

This morning I was part of a panel at the GigaOM Structure:Europe 2012 conference in Amsterdam., titled: The Evolution of Private PaaS solutions. The abstract: Enterprises are starting to take interest in running PaaS solutions virtually, as app developers want to focus on building apps rather than dealing with infrastructure issues. Enterprises that use PaaS solutions almost always go down the private route. In this session we focus on private.

Enterprise Agile: extending the agile process outside development

Enterprise Agile: extending the agile process outside development

I previously wrote about Enterprise Agile, not because I just want to put the “enterprise” moniker in front of everything, but because I think there are some fundamental challenges in moving to agile software development practices within enterprises, as opposed to startups. This follow-up post is triggered by the following comment on my previous article about this subject: Where we are struggling as an organization is the whole enterprise adopting agile. Sales and.

7 ways a Platform can fuel the App Economy

7 ways a Platform can fuel the App Economy

Earlier this year a Technet sponsored study showed that in February there were roughly 466,000 jobs in the “App Economy” in the United States. This so-called App Economy had zero jobs just 5 years ago, before the iPhone was introduced. The term “App Economy” isn’t formally defined but is often used to refer to the economy that has been created due to the development and delivery of software applications for.