PaaS Will Be the DNA of the Modern Enterprise
And HYPA the Architecture of Agentic and Everything it’s Becoming
Step back for a moment to the early 2000s. Picture a mainframe. Big, humming, monolithic. Now blow it up. Don’t destroy it. Abstract it. Pull it apart. Break it into pieces. Every batch job, every record update, every tightly-coupled hardware operation becomes something new. A service, a module, a puzzle piece you can copy, reuse, and reassemble.
That was the promise of Service-Oriented Architecture. Not just better code, but a better way to think. A shift away from monolithic execution toward modular composition. Strip out the tight coupling of a closed system. Build once, deploy many, reuse everywhere. Compose instead of code.
SOA wasn’t a technology revolution. It was a mental one. The only problem? It largely worked on paper and in some very dedicated pockets of large enterprise around the world. I definitely saw it in real life. The amazing team at Queensland Transport gave it real crack. But the infrastructure was still lagging behind.
You couldn’t copy a tape drive or an I/O port in the same way you could copy a function. You couldn’t abstract power, pipe, and port. Not yet anyway. The idea of reuse lived in our diagrams, but not in our deployments. So SOA lived in code but not in context. We talked services, but we deployed boxes.
Then infrastructure became code. You know the story. Cloud computing, IaaS, virtual everything.
When virtualisation took hold, and later, containerisation, the hardware caught up to the idea. It could be provisioned by script and policy instead of screwdriver and purchase order. Compute, storage, and network became dynamic. Scalable. Programmable.
Cloud and virtualisation wasn’t just a trick or an end point. It was the missing half. And suddenly, we could finally build what we’d only sketched. SOA became real. It could live end-to-end. Not just services, but orchestrated ecosystems.
Then came the hard part. Turning it into something useful. That meant waiting for both the architecture and the user to mature. For better business alignment.
With the explosion of apps in the 20-teens, we stopped building purely for process and started building for people. Not in the shallow sense. Not just better UI or persona templates. But in aligning functionality with what the business actually needed. Sales needed more than a form. HR needed more than a workflow. Field services needed more than an app. They needed composable, integrated functionality that respected the full context of how work actually gets done.
But we overshot. An app appeared for every niche, spun up outside any logical architecture. “App thinking” became heretic. Adjacent to any order. It left us with a wild tangle of point solutions that solved moments but fractured the whole. The explosion of apps didn’t just empower people. It fragmented the enterprise. Everyone got what they needed in the moment, but no one was steering the system. Functionality grew. Coherence didn’t.
That’s when we really started seeing the emergence of real platforms. Not codebases. Not middleware. Platforms. The kind that understand not just how to execute a function, but how to deliver a result. A workflow. An outcome. They weren’t perfect, and many still aren’t, but the ones that found their footing understood something fundamental. Personas drive patterns.
So they didn’t just write APIs and wait for developers to show up. They curated modular service libraries based on actual business roles and the core activities that power them. That’s why the service inventories in platforms like ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Microsoft evolved the way they did. They weren’t random. They were built around the job.
Start with Identity. Tasks. Requests. Incidents. Approvals. Records. Cases. Once you’ve nailed the foundational services that cut across industries, you get extensibility for free. Each module becomes a Lego block. Each block reflects an atomic unit of work. Not code, not infrastructure, but action. That’s DNA.
And that brings us to HYPA, the architecture of Agentic AI.
HYPA stands for Hybrid Platform Architectures. It’s a term I use to describe the next evolution. Not of PaaS itself, but of what PaaS has to become if it’s going to solve problems at a global scale. Because here’s the truth. A single platform, no matter how sophisticated, can’t contain the complexity of modern enterprise or global systems on its own.
To meet that challenge, the platform must be composable, not just in what it offers, but in what it is. It must function not only as a provider of services, but as a service itself. An orchestratable, interoperable component within a broader, evolving ecosystem. That’s not just an architectural twist. It’s a structural one. The platform becomes the DNA of the enterprise. Not the application, not the outcome, but the code that allows all outcomes to exist in the first place.
It’s meta, yes, but essential. Because you can’t scale intelligence, agility, or innovation if the foundation of your stack remains a closed system. The platform must model the very thing it enables: composability, inheritance, mutation. It must be the double helix, not the tool applied to it.
That’s what hybrid platform architecture (HYPA) is all about. It is interoperability at the architectural layer. Platform talking to platform. One PaaS embedding another. Shared workflows. Shared identities. Shared agents. Shared trust boundaries.
The same way we once broke apart monoliths to build SOA, we now need to break apart our platforms to build systems of platforms. That’s not a regression. It’s an acceleration.
The most advanced platforms are already headed this way. ServiceNow is not so quietly now exposing itself as a backbone orchestration layer. Salesforce is fragmenting into industry clouds while leaning on Mulesoft for deep integration. Microsoft is leaning hard into Entra, Loop, and the agentic future of co-pilots that span surfaces, not apps.
But the real test is coming. Because now we’re watching the SOA abstraction happen all over again. But this time, it’s happening to us.
We’re not just building service-oriented applications anymore. We’re building service-oriented workforces. That is the clear message behind Salesforce’s “digital labor platform” advertising.
It is the process-oriented pieces of our daily tasks. The emails, the approvals, the document pulls, the field updates, the triage responses. They are all being abstracted too. Taken from us and turned into composable agentic services. Delivered through orchestration engines that understand who we are, what we do, and what outcome we’re trying to achieve.
As AI matures and agents begin acting across systems, our architecture will be forced to reflect our intent. You can’t fake orchestration. Either the system understands who you are, what you need, and what needs to happen, or it doesn’t.
It requires the architecture of everything working in concert. Multiple personas, multiple systems, orchestrated through composable services, delivering outcomes instead of tasks. And if your platform can’t plug into that vision, it won’t matter how elegant your modules are.
In the HYPA world, the PaaS is the double helix. It is the DNA. And that’s not just metaphor. It is structural. We’ve spent decades abstracting our technology. Now we’re abstracting our labour. The process-oriented parts of how we work. The decisions, requests, approvals, and insights are all being broken down, sequenced, and rebuilt as agentic flows. Not just by technology, but through it. PaaS doesn’t just support this decomposition. It reflects it. It is it.
And if we get it right, we won’t just build better systems. We won’t just abstract the enterprise. We’ll build better ways to work.