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IBM PureApplication Systems: It Is Not PaaS. Period. But

By on May 3, 2012

IBM Impact has been going on at Las Vegas and the buzz around the event is IBM PureSystems. I see a lot of excitement around PureSystems both from IBM side and their customer side. However, I also see some confusion around the messaging. IBM has been sending ambiguous signals around IBM PureApplication Systems which is part of the IBM PureSystem family. There is an attempt to position it as Platform as a Service (PaaS). I find it rather disturbing and feel that it is adding confusion in the minds of enterprise buyers. In fact, I am not even sure if this is IBM’s official position yet. Depending on whom you talk to, you come out with a different perception. If you talk to engineers, they agree that it is not PaaS as in the cloud sense of the term. But if you talk to marketing and sales people, they will want to convince you that it is PaaS. Since the role of an analyst is to go beyond marketing pitches and tell the story as we see it, here I am with a blog post on the topic.

What is IBM PureSystems, BTW?

IBM PureSystems is their attempt at converged and integrated solutions pushing against their traditional competitors while also trying to show off some of their “coolness” to younger generation of IT and developers. Leaving behind the hyperbole, it is an expert integrated system that takes the complexity out for IT and Developers while giving them lot of flexibility and, also, making it easy for bursting out to the IBM’s own cloud. This product family comes in two flavors:

  • IBM PureFlex Systems: This is raw compute power which combines compute, storage, networking, virtualization and management into a single infrastructure system. A product that can compete with other converged infrastructure solutions in the market and which takes the complexity of operations out of IT. In layman terms, it is a highly optimized big box of raw compute power.
  • IBM PureApplication Systems: It is a platform system tuned specifically for transactional web and database systems. Though not an accurate description, you can imagine it as IBM PureFlex Systems with a WebSphere based platform layer weaved on the top to make it ready to run applications without any operational worries. In layman terms, it is a highly optimized powerful box ready to run applications out of the box.
One big different between the PureSystem family and other IBM hardware products/solutions is the lack of complexity in setting it up and running as well as the seamless interface with IBM SmartCloud. Essentially, any IBM customer using IBM PureSystems can easily burst into IBM SmartCloud without any code rewrite. Also, they use the concept of patterns which makes deployment and maintenance extremely easy and seamless. Alex Williams from ServicesAngle has a post on this topic. Patterns are a very powerful idea from a DevOps angle and it has the potential to transform enterprise IT in a significant way.

IBM PureApplication Systems are PaaS?

Some soundbytes coming out of IBM Impact 2012, especially from the marketing side, gives people an impression that IBM PureApplication System is PaaS. In fact, when I met Alex Williams at Impact 2012 two days back, he was troubled by the messaging he heard that it is a PaaS (Update: Here is Alex’s post on the topic). I dug in deep yesterday talking to engineers, marketers and even some practitioners on this topic and I can say with confidence that it is just not PaaS. Period. There is even another spin coming out of IBM that it enables PaaS but when I dug deeply, I came out convinced that it doesn’t even enable PaaS. Let me explain the logic behind my arguments below.
IBM PureApplication Systems are pretty good for legacy applications. Yes, one can deploy greenfield applications on these systems and there is no doubt about it. But if a developer is going to write a cloud centric distributed application, the natural question arises about the very need for such powerful integrated systems? The very idea of integrated systems itself goes against the concept of distributed systems. Any app developed for distributed systems (even without the safeguards like design for failure) is a horrible candidate for such integrated systems. So, the only meaningful set of apps PureApplication Systems can help are legacy apps.
Legacy apps are not the ideal candidates for PaaS. Well, if a PaaS provider supports such apps, one can push a legacy workload to their platform and enjoy some levels of optimization. I am not dismissing this use case but all I am saying is that they are not the ideal candidates for PaaS. So, even if a service provider takes PureApplication Systems and offers it as a service to their customers, they are only offering a “cloud-like” platform, in the form of a service, for legacy applications. It is not PaaS from the strictest sense of the term and any other use of the term is abuse of the term, in my opinion. In short, IBM PureApplication System is not PaaS #endofstory.

Aha, this is a case of another vendor cloud washing their legacy solution, right?

Not exactly. Even though PureApplication Systems are not PaaS in the strictest sense of the term, it is a pretty interesting offering, nevertheless. Let us face it folks, legacy apps are not going anywhere anytime soon. Organizations having invested such large amounts (foolishly?) on legacy applications are going to be conservative and will look only for incremental changes. Yes, I do agree that many enterprises are developing greenfield apps whenever they go for a new app but when it comes to existing apps, they are taking incremental steps which also includes pushing legacy apps to cloud or cloud like infrastructures (private cloud). This trend is going to continue for the next five years or so and opens up a great opportunity for a solution like PureSystems, which essentially takes the complexity out of the application platform in a highly optimized way. Remember, labor is still a significant part of the total cost of ownership and any solution that drastically reduces labor costs is considered to be a welcome addition to the market. It is not just the cost savings that is attractive but the agility it offers is really attractive to the large enterprises (the ones who are still not sure about cloud computing but want some of its benefits). In this sense, PureSystems family is a pretty good product in the market.

Though it is not PaaS, it offers many of the advantages offered by the cloud and when it is offered as a service from managed service providers, it even cuts down the CapEx for organizations. For organizations sticking on with legacy applications, such highly optimized solutions are a real boon. IBM can easily target this market (which is large, BTW) by unleashing their marketing and sales teams to “convince” customers to buy PureSystems. If the mood at Impact 2012 is any indication, they are on it already. It is not a PaaS by any standards but a highly optimized solution for large enterprises with large legacy investment and attitude. More interestingly, their idea of patterns will bring DevOps into these organizations, helping them improve drastically on the agility front.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and they also took care of my Impact travel and stay expenses.

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Krishnan Subramanian (a.k.a Krish) is the founder and Principal Analyst of Rishidot Research LLC. He was formerly an editor at CloudAve and now he is focussed only on Rishidot Research and Cloud Fieldnotes.

5 responses to “IBM PureApplication Systems: It Is Not PaaS. Period. But”

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  4. Sherwood
    Sherwood June 27, 2012 at 7:32 am |

    I found this is a very controversial topic as the author initially suggested. the logic behind the conclusion is “because the PureSystem supports legacy enterprise apps, and these legacy apps are not good candidate for PaaS, so PureSystem is not PaaS.”. This is like saying because I can hold a gun, I must be a criminal.

    We must recognize that there are many kind of enterprise “apps” out there and a big chunk of them are mission critical and care about transactional integrity, therefore they don’t lend themselves good candidate of the stateless, internet-scale architecture, e.g. bank’s core banking system (such as ATM) does not run on a Facebook like infrastructure, in other words, there is a big chunk of existing OLTP transactional workload that need PaaS services, and PureSystem tries to address tis type of workload first, then it can address further Cloud Centric workload as additional pattern.

    PaaS is a very broadly used term, it can be abused, if we go by Wikipedia’s PaaS definition, “Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a solution stack as a service”. My understanding of the key value of PaaS is it abstracts the typical ISVs/developers need around development, deployment and life cycle management so that developers can create apps and monetize from the app quickly. It doesn’t sound right to judge an offering is PaaS or not based on the workload that “can” run on.

    1. Krishnan Subramanian
      Krishnan Subramanian June 30, 2012 at 7:04 am |

      Thanks for your reply but I think you misunderstood my premise. It is not a service and anything that is not a service cannot be called as PaaS. Platform is a ok term but platform as a service is not.