Earlier this year, Sun talked about its PaaS aspirations and announced a string of releases including a set of pre-packaged virtual machine images of open-source software and a public API repository, aimed at shortening the time to market for developers.
Pepple said: "IT resources on tap [help] developers for start-ups or new projects to get an IT infrastructure ready quickly."
He said developers also need tools to help them manage and visualise their apps, to ease them into remote deployments.
"We also see developers starting to ask for help with traditional enterprise requirements like data security and service level agreements," Pepple added.
Tom Frazier, regional strategic account director, Asia-Pacific, Verizon Business, said standardisation through processes is necessary to help quell organisations' fears around flexibility and security.
Frazier said these issues can be addressed by structuring an automated work engine with tiers of service layers on the virtual infrastructure. Integrated firewall services can help meet an organisation's minimum security requirements, he said.
"Unfortunately, many development projects have security enabled towards the end of the development cycle." Including security earlier in the development process will allow it to move along with the project from test to production, he said.
Microsoft is hoping to draw developers to its Azure platform with familiar tools such as Visual Studio.
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Mark Glikson, general manager, developer and platform group, Microsoft Asia-Pacific, said in an email interview that Azure's integration with Visual Studio "allows for development to take place using the languages and approaches developers are already familiar with".
"In many ways, it makes the cloud feel more like a new set of available APIs... rather than an entirely new paradigm," Glikson said.
Microsoft envisions Azure as an "extension" of the desktop environment through its "software plus services" mantra, he added.
Therefore, tools for the cloud need to be interoperable with existing development environments that will also require less learning, Glikson said.
Australian Online Solutions's Johnston was optimistic about Azure. He said it will be interesting because it is based on the Microsoft .NET framework's Common Language Runtime engine.
The universal engine allows software developers to use different programming languages to write Windows applications, a benefit expected to apply to Azure as well.
On the other hand, limited language choices comprising only Python and Java on the competing platform from Google have "restricted Google App Engine to subsets of the developer community", said Johnston.
