PAASPORT · A SEMANTICALLY-ENHANCED MARKETPLACE OF INTEROPERABLE PLATFORM-AS-A-SERVICE OFFERINGS FOR THE DEPLOYMENT AND MIGRATION OF BUSINESS APPLICATIONS OF SMEs

The 36-month PaaSport project focuses on resolving the application portability issues that exist in the Cloud PaaS market through a flexible and efficient deployment and migration approach. To this end, PaaSport will combine Cloud PaaS technologies with lightweight semantics in order to specify and deliver a thin, non-intrusive Cloud-broker (in the form of a Cloud PaaS Marketplace), to implement the enabling tools and technologies, and to deploy fully operational prototypes and large-scale demonstrators.PaaSport will enable European Cloud vendors (in particular SMEs) to roll out semantically interoperable PaaS offerings leveraging their competitive advantage and the quality of service delivered to their customers, making their offerings more appealing and improving their outreach to potential customers, particularly the pan-European software industry. PaaSport will also facilitate European Software SMEs to deploy business applications on the best-matching Cloud PaaS and to seamlessly migrate these applications on demand. Therefore, PaaSport contributes to aligning and interconnecting heterogeneous PaaS offerings, overcoming the vendor lock-in problem and lowering switching costs.From a business perspective, PaaSport aims at lifting the barriers that cause the vendor lock-in problem, thus empowering Cloud customers and Cloud application developers (in particular, European SME Software vendors) and allowing them to choose freely the Cloud PaaS offering that best fits their needs. PaaSport is also expected to empower the position and encourage the entrance of European SME Cloud vendors, such as Flexiant, in an emerging market which is currently dominated by American colossi, such as Google and Amazon. In order to maximize the communities awareness and adoption of the PaaSport results, the PaaSport partners (mainly the participating Software SME Associations) intend to design and implement a focused set of European-wide dissemination ac