Innovation in LMS: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Last week, we continued highlighting excerpts of Khalil Yazdi's whitepaper, Innovation in LMS: Underlying Economic Drivers--Motivating a New Model for the Provisioning of Course, Teaching and Learning Management Software Systems, and explored Yazdi's examination of a concept very similar to SaaS, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). IaaS--like SaaS--presumes that middleware and business applications can be managed and operated independently of where and how core infrastructure is provided.

Today, we're highlighting Yazdi's examination of another delivery model very similar to SaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (IaaS). Where application development is important or necessary, PaaS offerings allow developers to focus their efforts on the business services without having to worry about also providing and managing the programming and operating environments within which applications will run.

As we continue exploring Yazdi's arguments, let us know how you think LMS delivery is evolving, and what you'd like to see from this wave of LMS innovation. Feel free to discuss in the comments below.


Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and its Place Among SaaS and IaaS

Where application development is important or necessary, there are also PaaS offerings that allow developers to focus their efforts on the business services without having to worry about also providing and managing the programming and operating environments within which applications will run. PaaS is also quite useful during efforts to migrate to cloud based services and for the purpose of preserving and enhancing legacy applications for which no SaaS alternative exists. With PaaS and IaaS in place, the costs of provisioning SaaS-based applications can be significantly reduced and can reinforce a greater emphasis on functional services.


More info on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

A computing platform that facilitates the development and deployment of web applications without requiring companies to build, configure and maintain the infrastructure that supports it. It is particularly important to PaaS provisioning when working with an application (SaaS) provider that allows user groups to contribute to the application code. A PaaS application development technology framework should:

• Support application lifecycle management, (including: design, development, testing, delivery, change control and software updates) and is not dependent on a particular infrastructure provider (that is, it is non-proprietary on the back end);

• Be easy to use and provides a library of user/developer support tools, and templates that includes security, privacy and interoperability;

• Include a business process modeling framework, support for business workflow, work with many “devices” and provisioning environments and support rapid on-boarding of developed applications;

• Have high availability, scalability and support application development that meets SaaS capacity and load characteristics (including management tools, resilience, persistence, accessibility, and multi-browser capabilities).