Abstract
The introduction of cloud computing has heralded a fundamental change for the world of IT. Through various forms of cloud computing, organizations have been offered alternatives to traditional, in-house software development and to the acquisition of their own technical infrastructure. An investigation of these offerings, in particular PaaS, provides insight into how the process of simplification in cloud based software development can provide significant value through the reduction of IT acquisition and operation costs and through the realization of improved development and operational performance. While there are many opportunities for success, there are also difficulties that organizations must overcome to realize these benefits. This paper provides insight into the cloud-based IT development process of applications and their architecture with an emphasis on the Platform-as-a-Service model using force.com as an illustrative example.