With the dawn of cloud computing, businesses of all shapes and sizes gained access to shared, enterprise-grade infrastructure and a team of experts who managed it. This started simple and evolved through the following stages:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Rather than building your own datacenter, you now have access to provision virtual machines, storage, and software-defined networks on a shared infrastructure.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): Now you don’t need to concern yourself with provisioning the infrastructure. You are provided with technology specific buckets to drop your app in and it just runs and scales automatically.
• Functions as a Service (FaaS): At this point, you don’t care about servers. You have code and you want it to run. You hand it to the cloud and it does the REST.

What these stages represent is a progression toward not caring… but in a good way. A business that sells mattresses shouldn’t have to become a technology company to succeed. Stop reinventing the wheel and focus on differentiating factors!

Teams as a Service (TaaS)

I think that the next logical step in this progression is Teams as a Service. What I mean by this, is that a company that is good at building software teams can offer its managed teams as a service to other companies. Now your business can truly focus on the problem you are trying to solve rather than the technical details of how to solve it.

Why teams? Because software development is a cross-functional discipline (Dev, Test, UX, UI, Product, Ops, …). It takes all of the functions to build healthy software. Why should it be offered as a service? Because building good software teams is really hard!

I realize that the role of the software consultant has been around for a while now. What I am talking about is less of a new concept and more of proper execution and building of trust. It took years to get to the point where companies began to trust the cloud. The reality is that the cloud is more stable and secure than most of the home-grown data centers. In the same way, I think that companies will realize that most home-grown development isn’t that efficient. Most probably think that what they deal with is normal. At Induro, our goal is to demonstrate the potential of an efficient team.