I've recently written a bit about the job opportunities with PaaS taking over the software development world. One of the great promises of PaaS is the same as one of cloud's big benefits - the illusion of infinite scalability and elasticity.

Configure a PaaS platform with a cloud infrastructure service (an IaaS) and you now have the ability to dream as big as you want, without having to pay for (or deploy manage) all the hardware and software you would normally need.

But what if you don't want to dream infinitely big? What if you need to create a neat little business-side service and you are, in fact, a business-side person?

PaaS comes to the rescue here as well, with application platforms rather than integration platforms. Further, there is a distinction here between PaaS software for programmers and software built for the business side, which is visual in nature and uses a "metadata" approach to launch your neat little idea on the fly, as it were.

The irony is that business-side software development may be one of the keys to the kingdom in coming years. If the business side is able to execute its ideas without being bogged down (in its view) by IT and deploy on metered, third-party cloud infrastructures that also bypass IT, then the way we think of enterprise IT and the role of enterprise IT management may be altered, perhaps transformed, forever.

No reason to get carried away with this vision just yet. Security issues will always be waved as red flags by IT management, it may turn out that business-side people may unwittingly end up creating their own little app production departments (which they'll have to manage), and the entire notion of business-side-driven IT is quite a different concept than simply business-driven IT.

But as I ponder PaaS, I can see that this is not a monolithic part of the computing landscape, not just a single type of cloud. I welcome tweets and emails about any and all business-side PaaS journeys that you've already embarked upon.

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