The transition to Cloud Computing started with specific applications delivered in the cloud. One early example was the online travel reservation system, with which thousands of travel agents became able to access centralized reservation systems using only a PC to make bookings for their clients. Today, this transition continues for mainstream applications across the IT industry. The consumer software market shows great success in the cloud model with examples such as Gmail, e-commerce stores like Amazon, auctioning sites like eBay, and search engines like Google. All are delivered from huge shared data centers, where all data and functions are centralized and controlled.
Cloud architecture requires new application platforms optimized for shared and centralized operations. These new platforms are called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), utility platforms, or simply cloud platforms. New applications built from scratch and designed to be delivered via the cloud are ideally developed and operated on these cloud platforms. However, these pure, entirely cloud-optimized platforms pose a sizable challenge to software vendors of on-premise applications who want to offer their existing applications in the cloud. This is because most of today’s PaaS offerings require a complete rewrite of applications from scratch, at significant cost and time. This white paper describes an offering from Fujitsu – SaaS Enablement Services – aimed at simplifying the transition from on-premise applications to cloud applications. Fujitsu SaaS Enablement Services offer an incremental approach based on two major underlying principles: