For Application Development & Program Management Professionals (Length: 21 pages)

Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Enterprises must support hundreds or even thousands of applications to meet growing business demands, but this growth is dramatically driving up the cost of running and managing the databases under those applications. The stress this puts on the IT budget makes it harder to provide databases to support new requirements such as Web 2.0 applications or other emerging collaboration solutions or even to support more mundane uses such as increased application testing. A new emerging option called database-as-a-service (DaaS) hosts databases in the cloud and is a good fit for some new apps. Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Saleforce.com as well as small innovators such as EnterpriseDB, LongJump, and Elastra are all targeting the DaaS market. Although most of today's DaaS solutions are very simple, in the next two to three years, more sophisticated offerings will evolve to support larger and more complex apps. Therefore, application development professionals should consider DaaS for some applications today and plan to expand its scope of use as DaaS offerings' capabilities expand.