There is a lot of news this week in the platform-as-a-service market (PaaS), with companies like Apprenda extending its technology to offer on-premise and hybrid methods for deploying enterprise applications.
Apprenda, with its new 4.0 release, allows a customer to run a PaaS simultaneously beween the data center and a cloud infrastructure. The service means that a company can get one view of its on-premise and cloud offerrings.
In addition, Apprenda announced the capability to connect Windows Server 2012 environments with cloud-based Windows Azure resources. This makes it possible to run this hybrid cloud PaaS approach in the Windows Azure cloud and other cloud environments that use Windows Server 2012.
Apprenda has established itself as a company that specializes in providing on-premise PaaS solutions to large enterprise customers. The company competes with VMware’s Cloud Foundry and new players to the on-premise PaaS market such as AppFog.
Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller said to me in an interview last week that the company has put an emphasis 0n making it simple to deploy apps with a single-click feature that then runs the Apprenda service from private to public cloud. The customer can also set policies for doing this automatically based on business needs and parameters.
One thing always strikes me when I talk to Apprenda executives. These guys know the enterprise and the culture of the organizations that they serve. Schuller comes out of the world of financial services where he worked in IT developing applications for large banks. Last night I chatted with Vice President of Products Rakesh Malhotra here at the Amazon Web Services Re:invent conference who stressed that what IT wants are software and services that fit with their work, which makes sense. That means making the tools Apprenda develops dead simple to use.
The PaaS space is really ramping up. There will be lots of developments this week with the Amazon event happening. Apprenda’s move to hybrid PaaS is a trend that we should see play out across the market as more customers think how they can leverage both their on-premise and cloud infrastructures.