When seeking to get one’s application off the ground there are many platform-as-a-service vendors that provide attractive, custom-built business process automation. By leveraging built-in infrastructure services, companies don’t have to spend their dollars on software deployment and delivery. Many vendors have emerged as market leaders, including Force.com, Bungee Labs and Coghead.

Depending on your application, some platforms have ‘flavor’ and are better than others for nestling with certain apps. Other platforms are ‘flavorless’ — meaning they are not predisposed to any specific types of applications. Which one is better in the long haul will become apparent over time.

But relying on someone else’s platform can create an entirely new set of problems. For a budding application provider with an exceptionally healthy growth curve, the platform could have difficulty scaling to handle the multiplying number of users. Saving money on upfront deployment is one thing, but inhibiting future growth could mean missing out on future opportunity and business, and is ultimately more harmful to a new company. To illustrate this, what if Facebook was an application built on Salesforce.com? The student would surpass the teacher.

Vendor lock-in is another serious issue. PaaS offerings provide either proprietary service interfaces or proprietary development languages which tie an application to the platform. This is is sure to cause future headaches for developers.

Developers beware…