GigaOM » Engine Yard

Engine Yard vet starts Cloud Foundry consultancy

Barb Darrow — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 12:42:45 +0000

Dr. Nic Williams, a “developer’s developer” who was also VP of engineering at Engine Yard, is on to new things and a new Platform as a Service. He’s founded Stark & Wayne, a consultancy that will focus on helping companies deploy the Cloud Foundry PaaS that VMware spun off to the Pivotal Initiative.

Williams appears tightly aligned with Cloud Foundry — one of two customers mentioned on his web page is the Pivotal Initiative and he is working out of the Pivotal Labs office in San Francisco. Pivotal Labs, now part of EMC, is contributing technology to the Pivotal Initiative. Confused? Sorry.

Stark & Wayne is thus far a one-man show. According to Williams blog post, the company name comes from “the two most famous fictional tool creators – Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne. Every developer can be a super hero. You just need the right tools. Batmobile optional.”

The goal of the startup is to help companies adopt PaaSes. And that’s important — many developers within companies love the freedom and flexibility of building and deploying their applications on a third party pay-as-you-go platform but often their corporate IT overlords are not so enamored of the model. That’s because sticky questions arise if, for example, your PaaS of choice goes away.

Per Williams’ blog post announcing his move:

“If you’ve used Heroku for your pet projects, then we want to bring you Cloud Foundry for your work projects. We also want to work with you on your projects. If your workplace cares about continuously improving development and operations, then you qualify.”

VMware pushed Cloud Foundry as an open-source foundation for other PaaSes like AppFog, Uhuru, Stackato, and others. Presumably the Pivotal Initiative will continue down that path although it’s not saying. Salesforce.com’s Heroku is another market leader. It is unclear how much traction Engine Yard has relatively speaking although Oracle bought a stake in it in November.

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Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 07:55:08 +0000

In 2013 IT organizations that support large enterprises will have to figure out how to successfully get mission-critical systems onto public and private cloud computing platforms. The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 is not a matter of prediction but more a matter of following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends, discussed in this report, include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more.

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Platform as a Service in 2012

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 06:55:58 +0000

The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is predicted to reach $20.1 billion in 2014. Huge brands occupy this emerging space, including Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.com. Many newer startups enter the market each month, too. The recent trend is that more features and functions win the day, especially those with the ability to instantly provision resources for PaaS-built applications, such as elastic storage, compute, and database services. This report examines the key disruptive trends that shape the emerging PaaS market and where companies will position themselves to gain share and increase revenue.

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Apprenda seeks to make private PaaS more practical

Barb Darrow — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Many corporate developers have tried a platform as a service — Heroku, Engine Yard, Cloud Foundry — to develop and test applications. But when it comes time to deploy those applications, it’s hard to get their companies to approve running those applications on PaaSes that themselves run atop Amazon Web Services or other public cloud infrastructure.

One reason for that reluctance is that IT pros are acutely aware that outages at Amazon have impacted Heroku and other PaaS providers . But nonetheless, developers have whet their appetite working on these public platforms and now want to keep working with them but in a way that is palatable to their bosses, says Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda, the maker of a .Net-specific PaaS.

To help developers make that jump, the Clifton Park, NY-based vendor now offers a new free public PaaS instance called ApprendaCloud.com they can experiment with and then bring in-house to run on IT-approved infrastructure.

Apprenda had offered a downloadable version of is PaaS but feedback was that developers wanted an online instance they can use in the public cloud then just pull in-house, overcoming IT objection, Schuller said.

Some companies are interested in bringing PaaSes in-house because they would like to field a single platform to build and run both internal and customer-facing applications.

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PaaS market accelerators, 2012–2013

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 06:55:28 +0000

In recent months many have focused on PaaS solutions as an enabling technology to bring more control to the development and deployment of cloud-based applications and business processes. This research note will focus on the practical uses of PaaS technology for the enterprise, as well as how to move from an existing application-development technology to the use of PaaS solutions. It will also discuss how to make sense of the emerging PaaS market and players and make critical recommendations that will increase the chances of success in moving to PaaS technology.

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Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 06:55:39 +0000

Cloud computing continues to change and shape the technology industry, and these days discussions are about more than simply reorganizing the IT department. New developments in chip and hardware architectures, finding greener data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying data analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. For this report, GigaOM Pro has gathered six of its analysts to discuss these topics and others in current cloud market. Here we present several areas to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud.

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Veteran PaaS player Engine Yard claims big momentum

Barb Darrow — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:00:41 +0000

Engine Yard, the popular platform as a service, said its revenue doubled year over year to $28 million in 2011 and the number of paying customers rose 50 percent to 2,000 in that time. The privately held company would not comment on profitability.

There is definitely more interest in PaaS by developers who don’t want to worry about hardware and software infrastructure — the scaffolding of development. They want to focus on their key concern: developing and deploying applications.

Engine Yard started out as a Ruby-oriented PaaS but added support for other languages including PHP via its acquisition of Orchestra last August. In November, the company plugged the popular Node.js server-side framework into its PaaS as well.

The demand for PaaSes may be growing but so is the number of contenders for that business. Engine Yard competes with multi-language PaaS from AppFog and Heroku, now part of Salesforce.com and VMware’s Cloud Foundry. (Some other PaaS players still concentrate on supporting one language well — as Cloudbees does with Java.)

Mike Piech, VP of product management and marketing, for Engine Yard, said there’s plenty of business to go around as more companies, and different types of companies, move workloads to PaaS. “If you think of the value of PaaS, you’re offloading everything except the app itself — the load balancing, the application servers, the web infrastructure to someone else so you can focus on innovation and time to market — that’s valuable to many types of companies,” he said.

Early traction came mostly from Web 2.0 companies but now Piech said enterprises of all kinds are hiring developers to work on their behalf using PaaS infrastructure.

He said there might be a shake out in the segment but said that will affect lower-end, less mature options. “We’ve been in the business six years, through a couple of generations of PaaS. We’ve built the expertise and our clients have grown up with us,” he said.

While industry giants VMware and Salesforce.com have built (or bought) PaaS power, other huge contenders include Microsoft with its Windows Azure service. Given all that consolidation, it will be interesting to see how smaller, independent players like Engine Yard will fare going forward.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user dandeluca

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Infrastructure Q4: Big data gets bigger and SaaS startups shine

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:44:59 +0000

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Engine Yard plugs Node.js into its cloud

Barb Darrow — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:00:33 +0000

Engine Yard’s Platform-as-a-Service offering is adding support for Node.js applications.

This is just the latest indication that Node.js, a server-based and event-driven JavaScript framework, is becoming table stakes in cloud development and deployment environments. Engine Yard competitors like AppFog and Heroku, now part of Salesforce.com, already support the framework.

Developers like using Node.js because it supports JavaScript — a very popular language for client-side development — and because it is fast and scalable .

Specifically, Engine Yard said that the first release of Engine Yard Labs — a program to give developers early access to new features — will include support for Node.js. That access will be enabled on Friday, the company said.

There is a caveat however. According to a blog post announcing the news:

Features released through Engine Yard Labs are not officially supported and may or may not become supported as part of Engine Yard products in the future.

San Francisco-based Engine Yard started out focused on Ruby on Rails but added PHP support through its acquisition of Orchestra in August. Virtually every PaaS player from AppFog to Microsoft Azure is in an arms race to support as many languages as possible.

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Who’s next on Oracle’s hit list?

Barb Darrow — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:06:03 +0000

Today, Oracle dropped $1.5 billion to buy RightNow Technologies ( s RNOW) to help fill out its newly announced public cloud vision. Last week it bought privately-held Endeca to bolster its big data push.

Having spent more than $70 billion on 40 purchases in the last few years, Oracle co-president Safra Catz said earlier this month that the company would throttle back on “big acquisitions.” But, Oracle bought two companies after that and no one else expects the buying behavior to stop.

Oracle certainly has the financial wherewithal to buy what it needs: As of its most-recently-closed quarter, Oracle had $31.66 billion in cash. Oracle stock is doing well, closing today at $32.87, having recovered from a mid-August swoon to below $25.

So, as Oracle wants to fill out in its cloud strategy and/or tick off other boxes on its to-do list, here are some potential acquisitions that make sense.

1: NetSuite–More SaaS smarts

Since Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already owns a big chunk of NetSuite, some think this is a no-brainer. NetSuite was built from the ground up as a SaaS provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that runs on Oracle infrastructure, which also makes it a nice fit. While, some say Ellison’s partial ownership of NetSuite would be problematic, Oracle has bought Ellison-staked companies in the past–most recently acquiring Pillar Data in June.

NetSuite’s target audience tends to be smaller companies than those Oracle typically takes on, but some observers think to keep up its growth, Oracle has to get more aggressive in that market.

“RightNow made sense because Oracle and Larry Ellison is fixated on Salesforce.com and will do anything to disrupt them,” said one Wall Street analyst who did not want to be named. NetSuite could have a similar impact.

2: BMC Software–Management, management, management

With a market cap of about $7 billion, BMC would be another big-ticket buy for Oracle. But then again BMC could help Oracle bridge the management divide between on-premises software and the various cloud deployment models, said Dana Gardner, principal analyst for Interarbor Research.

With BMC aboard, Oracle could also fend off charges that it’s building a big Oracle-only hardware-software vault for its customers. The Redwood Shores, Calif. company is getting increasingly sensitive to charges that it wants to lock customers in and BMC could help it show that it will continue to offer interoperability with non-Oracle systems.

3: Informatica–Better, cleaner data

Some think Informatica long rumored to be in Oracle’s crosshairs, is still a viable target. Informatica would bring with it data integration and ETL (extract/transform/load) expertise. ETL technologies are used to funnel data in from diverse sources, put it into a format useable for the application at hand, and load it (typically) into data warehouses.

But one Wall Street watcher said if that deal made sense it would have been done by now. And it would not be trivial: Informatica has a market cap of about $4.77 billion.

4: Tibco Software–More middleware, SOA smarts

TIBCO Software Inc., also leaps to mind as a possible fit for Oracle not only because of its strength in middleware and Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology, but for its cloud application platform called Silver. Tibco also boasts some pretty impressive financial services customers and reportedly rejected a Hewlett-Packard buyout bid last year–something that might intrigue Oracle.

There would also be technology overlap there, but given Oracle’s explosive growth into new markets, there are not potential acquisitions that would not include some overlap. People also forget that Oracle ended up paying well over $7 billion for PeopleSoft’s HRM smarts while already fielding its own HRM software. Overlap does not seem to be an issue for Oracle.

5: Engine Yard–Hipper tool selection

Oracle has a ton of Java expertise by virtue of its buyouts of Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems. But if it wants to woo web-age developers, it needs to do more with the languages popular for that crowd.

“What about Perl, Python, Groovy–all those scripting languages? Salesforce.com bought Heroku, Oracle needs to do something there,” said Gardner. A company like Engine Yard would be an interesting fit and could attract these fast, young developers that might think of Oracle as a boring enterprise software company, he said.

Engine Yard started out as a Ruby-on-Rails oriented PaaS but this summer acquired PHP PaaS startup Orchestra to broaden its reach.

Some of these aforementioned deals would be quite pricey but that probably doesn’t matter given Oracle’s cash trove. “Oracle can buy whoever and whatever it wants,” said Jeff Matthews, managing partner of RAM Partners, PLC, a Greenwich, Conn. investment firm.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Chika

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