Platform as a Service (PaaS)

To provide and consume software and hardware as services, labeled under the umbrella term "cloud computing", has proved to be a sustainable trend, both in the B2C and in the B2B market (Bandulet et al. 2010). Usually, we distinguish between the concepts of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). While IaaS provides hardware virtually and "on demand", SaaS offers software applications which can be used via the Internet or other networks. The concept of Platform-as-a-Service often remains invisible to the user as it provides the necessary operating platforms for the virtually provided applications. Nevertheless, the PaaS concept has successfully shown to be a service model that can be offered independently, as the Google App Engine or Force.com of Salesforce.com exemplify. Thus, PaaS extends the role model of the SaaS ecosystem to the platform provider as an additional actor and thus offers interesting new aspects to Information Systems research and the software industry. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]