Active Endpoints posted a recording of a keynote entitled “Leveraging the Cloud in the Development Environment”  from recent MassTLC’s Software Development Summit. One of the speakers was Active Endpoints CTO Dr. Michael Rowley,  who discussed the state of app development in the cloud with  three other executives in the industry.

Active Endpoints provides a cloud-based business platform dedicated entirely to the development and deployment of process management (BPM) apps. Rowley is in charge of Cloud Extend, a software solution that offers a BPM management solution integrated into Salesforce.

The panel discussed several different topics, including the cloud’s impact on application development, and some of the things vendors need to address in order to be able to attract customers in an increasingly competitive market. Among of the requirements that were brought up is up-time assurance, security and data portability – directly involved with the big data trend sweeping through many organizations today. The four industry veterans also expanded into the advantages and value of the cloud for this particular segment, kicking off the debate by referring to platform-as-a-service as a “fantastic abstraction layer.” There’s a trade-off involved, though many developers are willing to exchange a certain degree of flexibility for a much more simplified and subsequently efficient  environment to work in.

Providers are adding new layers to the premise of PaaS, offering more and more functionality. Last month AppFog announced it is working on bringing third-party addons to its platform, starting by partnering up with MongoLab and New Relic. The latter’s app monitoring SaaS has been integrated into quite a few cloud platforms throughout the past few months.

Tier 3 is one of the companies that teamed-up with New Relic, and it’s also looking into PaaS. It even made a big contribution to Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open-source and rather popular PaaS.