<p>MarioCruz understands an enterprise CIO's reluctance to embrace Platform as a Service (PaaS). He used tobe one of them. During his more than 20 years in IT, including eight years as CIO of Chicago-basedRewards Network Inc., he's been around a few traditional data centers and the keeper of many legacysystems.</p><p>Now as the co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of startup Choose Digital, Cruz hasharnessed his business to the cloud. He and partner Stephen Humphreys founded the company in early2011 as a "white label" alternative to iTunes. In essence, Choose Digital is a digital supply chainfor music, movies, TV shows, books and games. Their customers, which include United Airlines andMarriott, use Choose Digital's system to render digital rewards for their respective customerloyalty programs while keeping their own branding and controlling their own user data.</p><p>For a startup company with big ambitions, Platform as a Service, which allows users to rentvirtualized hardware, operating systems, storage and network capacity over the Internet, was a goodfit, Cruz said. The service delivery model allows Choose Digital to rent virtualizedservers and associated services for running existing applications and -- critical to itssuccess -- to rapidly develop and test new applications.</p><p>"Our goal was to build an API that created a digital supply chain for any company to use andPaaS was perfect for that," Cruz said. "We had decided early on that if a service wasn't core toour business, we'd rather have someone else manage it, and with PaaS we knew it was going to bemore secure, faster and usually cheaper, three things we wouldn't get internally."</p><p><a href="http://searchcio.techtarget.com/feature/Its-time-for-CIOs-to-abandon-fear-and-embrace-PaaS-solutions">Keep reading...</a></p>