Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller

As of now, Apprenda will also support Java, says CEO Sinclair Schuller. It’s not really a huge surprise, even though Schuller was a vocal proponent of single-langauge PaaSes . Last May, he told GigaOM if he were forced to choose a second language to support, Java would be it.

Well the time has come. “Our thesis has been we want to be the enterprise PaaS and for that we’ll tackle the two languages that make up 80 percent of the [corporate] application portfolio,” Schuller said in a recent interview. “Some companies are 60 percent/40 percent Java, some 60 percent/40 percent .NET but Java and .Net are always in there.”

Apprenda counts Honeywell and Diebold as reference customers and now adds JP MorganChase to the list. The country’s largest bank has decided to develop, deploy and maintain all its custom .NET and Java applications on Apprenda. At a time when many of the multi-language public PaaSes have a hard time naming real customers, this is something of a coup.

These customers use Apprenda for applications for handling  patient relationship management, oncology treatment, mortgage management, inventory management and predictive analytics for retail and other verticals, Schuller said.

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To beef up its PaaS-is-fit-for-the-enterprise message, the Clifton Park, N.Y. company is naming Wayne Boomer as its new VP of operations and finance. Boomer was CFO and SVP of finance for On2 Technologies, a developer of video codec technology acquired by Google three years ago. Boomer was also CFO of Inmedius, a software company acquired by Boeing last year and was finance and operations director of MapInfo’s UK operations.

Boomer will report to Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller.

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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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Last December, Uhuru launched a beta its PaaS but went back to add a new management console and integration to  popular applications including WordPress (see disclosure), SugarCRM and Magento and its own file storage service. Users of some other PaaSes rely on Amazon  S3 storage. The revamped AppCloud Ready to Go was available as a private beta in late June and has since signed 1,100 developers, Surkan said.

Uhuru was founded by two Microsoft veterans: Jawak Khaki, a former corporate VP, and Jawaid Ekram, former GM of Live Meeting services.

Uhuru’s service competes with ActiveState’s Stackato, AppFog and Tier3, which are offering cross-platform Cloud Foundry-based PaaSes of their own. There is some debate, however, about whether multi-platform PaaSes really are better than their language-specific counterparts. Companies like ActiveState, Apprenda  and AppHarbor are pitching their .NET platforms as providing better, deeper integration and support of that Microsoft technology.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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While many in the Web 2.0 and mobile device world dominated by iOS and Android don’t see Windows and .NET as the platforms of the future, millions of people are running those applications in thousands of businesses. That is not a constituency to ignore.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Mobilize.net, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Artinsoft led by CEO Tom Button, who was formerly corporate VP of Microsoft’s developer tools division. DeeDee Walsh, who just stepped down as director of business development for that Microsoft division, is now VP of marketing and business development for Mobilize.net.  The company will use Artinsoft technology to bring older .NET applications to the Microsoft Azure or any cloud and to mobile devices as required by customers.

“We have an offering now for Azure via Artinsoft, but if customers want to put their .NET applications on Amazon Web Services, heck yeah, we’ll do that,” Walsh said in an interview.

Artinsoft, based in San Jose, Costa Rica, has a long history with Microsoft. When the company revamped its Visual Studio tool set from 6.0 to .NET, it broke a lot of compatibility. Artinsoft provided the best conversion tools to bring those older applications to .NET, Walsh said. Microsoft included Artinsoft’s tools in the Visual Studio box. “They were great at moving VS 6.0 appiations to .NET but that was not a growing market. Moving all these .net applications to the cloud and to mobile devices is huge,” Walsh said.

Windows applications, which still dominate on laptop and desktop PCs but lag on mobile devices, are getting a lot of attention now. Popular open-source oriented configuration management tools from Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) are adding more Windows and .NET support. And Github, long the collaborative software versioning tool and repository of choice for open-source types, just added its first native Windows interface to make it easier for windows developers to use the product. And Amazon just added .NET support to its Elastic Beanstalk.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user AdamSelwood

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Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller

Among platform as a service vendors, the race is on to embrace as many programming languages as possible. Microsoft Azure, VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Saleforce.com’s Heroku all proudly claim language (and framework) agnosticism.

But that isn’t necessarily a good thing, argues Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda, a PaaS vendor that has taken a distinctly different approach. Clifton Park, N.Y.-based Apprenda has chosen to fully embrace — and exploit — the Microsoft-centric .NET world, not the rest of the programming universe. Boiled down, his view is that any PaaS that professes to be a jack of all trades is truly a master of none. He said:

“On the surface, it sounds utopian to say one platform covers everything. But we find it doesn’t work. If you’re trying to bridge lots of stacks with CloudFoundry or whatever, you have to focus on the common value across all of them and let’s face it, Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, are all very different from each other.”

Apprenda has some big-name customers, including Diebold and Honeywell, building private PaaSes with its tool. “What typically happens is when a customer goes to implement a PaaS, as soon as their different [in-house] stacks deviate, there’s a problem. If 50 percent of their apps are .NET, a specialized .NET PaaS can exploit those apps fully while a multi-language PaaS cannot,” said Schuller.

While Apprenda is fighting the crowd, it’s not totally alone. Cloudbees proudly declares its focus on Java/JVM-based applications.

A Java-focused PaaS will better suit a customer’s native Java applications and features, said Cloudbee’s CEO Sacha Labourey via email.  And then there’s the service component of the PaaS. Labourey wrote:

“By using a PaaS, you are not just outsourcing the entire management and monitoring of your stack to a third-party provider, this vendor also becomes your place to go whenever you need help in understanding what’s going wrong with your application, why your transactions are failing, why some strange exceptions are showing-up, etc.”

To be credible, the PaaS vendor needs deep expertise in that customer’s preferred language and framework — a PHP or .NET expert won’t be much help troubleshooting a Java issue.  ”Today, I know of very few companies that have the depth to help customers understand very hard problems, on all possible languages. The bottom line is that a number of polyglot PaaS solutions out there are more akin to dignified generic hosting solution than a real ally through the ups and downs of your application lifecycle, ” Labourey added.

Apprenda’s Schuller probably couldn’t agree more. He said his customers — like most businesses — run a ton of Windows applications. Apprenda’s appeal to them is that it can put those on-premises applications into the SaaS realm because of its Windows DNA.

If you forced him to choose a second language to support, it would probably be Java, he acknowledged. “But our goal is to focus on Microsoft and Azure and just be really great at that.”

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Jian Awe

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Virtualization kingpin VMware keeps working its plan to become a bona fide application development powerhouse. The company’s acquisition of Springsource and its Java framework three years ago was just the beginning. VMware’s Springsource-based vFabric Suite 5.1, announced Tuesday, adds application deployment automation, a version of the Postgres database optimized for vSphere as well as the SQLFire in-memory distributed database to the advanced vFabric Suite. Those perks are geared to make vFabric more attractive to web scale developers.

In this quest for developer love, VMware must again lock horns with Microsoft which — for all its problems moving to the cloud — remains the lodestone for developers with its wildly successful .NET franchise. And it also takes on Amazon Web Services, already a fan favorite among developers who have used this pay-as-you go infrastructure as an application building and testing ground for years. Of late, Amazon has added more enterprise-class development capabilities, most recently by providing .NET support to its Elastic Beanstalk platform as well as managed SQL Server database services. This is quite the battle royale brewing.

Springsource, with its Java framework and stack (including the Apache HTTP Server, Tomcat Java application server) is popular among open-source oriented Java developers, but compared to the Microsoft lineup of tools, it comes up short. It also has to contend with Java development stacks from Oracle and the Eclipse open-source Java crowd. The Advanced Suite with all the database goodies, vFabric RabbitMQ message broker and vFabrid Application Director for deployment automation lists for $2,500 per VM. The standard suite is $1,500 per VM.

VMware’s plusses and minuses

On the plus side, Paul Maritz, VMware CEO and Tod Neilsen, co-president of the company’s application division, are both Microsoft veterans, and ran big development organizations for years. They have credibility.

More important, according to Interarbor Solutions analyst Dana Gardner, VMware has been building out the infrastructure for the operational side of the cloud for years — VMware is the defacto virtualization standard inside enterprises and  hundreds of  cloud service providers and managed service providers are using vSphere to build their clouds. “For developers that want fungibility — to be able to develop and implement apps once and then move them without a lot of grief from on premises to cloud and back again, this is a big deal,” Gardner said.

Still, compared to Microsoft and the open-source Java Eclipse ecosystem, vFabric still has a lot to prove. There are just not that many people are using it, says Don Jones, senior partner with Concentrated Technology, an IT consultancy

VMware is not known for its “developer love,” the devotion that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer popularized in his infamous developers, developers, developers rant more than a decade ago.

“Microsoft, if nothing else, knows about toolsets and developers and VMware still has to show that it does,” said Jones. Microsoft really knows how to package up toolsets in a way that makes developers productive very fast. “There’s no Java developer in the world that can compete with a .Net developer  – the Microsoft tools are that good,” he said

So while VMware’s application development stack looks good on paper, and the promise of a distributed data layer atop it could be a boon for mobile and web application developers, people need to try it out.

The in-memory database card

David McJannet, director of VMware cloud and application services group, said the inclusion of SQLFire data layer is critical in making vFabric a go-to stack for web developers because it will let them provide fast response time to queries from potentially millions of end users. “It used to be that the canonical application was a few 100 users accessing something like SAP. Today the canonical application is different…it could be 100 people today and 5 million next week. For [the application] to scale the real pressure is on the data tier. There’s lots of buzz around big data but there is also the need for fast data. Getting data into memory really fast so end points — which are probably mobile devices — can get their answer back quickly.”

Gartner VP Massimo Pezzini stressed the importance of SQLFire to VMware’s plan. Pezzini said via email:

“In-memory technologies like SQLFire (an in-memory DBMS) and GemFire (an in-memory data grid, which is also part of vFabric) enable developers to build applications that can dynamically scale up to hundreds of servers and run extremely fast, by keeping data in the computer central memory rather than on disk. In principle these technologies enable the implementation of applications that are simply “unthinkable” in traditional, disk-based data architectures.”

He also said VMware, with its emphasis on this in-memory technology is also taking on enterprise software giants like SAP — which is pushing its HANA in-memory database appliance hard, and Oracle which bought TimesTen for its in-memory database capability a few years ago. VMWare’s argument is that the SQLFire data layer in its suite, applies this technology in a modern scale-out way while SAP and Oracle remain focused on the more old-school scale up world view in which pricey, high-end appliances ae built specifically to attack a problem.

Given these players — Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, SAP, Oracle — it’s going to be an interesting journey.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nick, Programmerman

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The new PaaS, called Web Fabric, is built on Tier3′s previously announced Iron Foundry implementation of Cloud Foundry that adds support for the Microsoft .NET framework. VMware itself, which is locked in a death match with Microsoft, is not disposed to support .NET, although Cloud Foundry natively supports multiple languages and frameworks, including Java, Ruby, PHP and Python.

Tier 3  also unveiled a suite of database services, called Data Fabric, that will give customers the option of running MongoDB, Redis, SQL Server, MySQL or PostGres databases that can connect to Web Fabric, Tier 3′s flagship infrastructure-as-a-service servers or even external applications. Those services should be live June 1, the company said.

A company spokeswoman said Tier 3′s enterprise customers will be able to access and manage their IaaS,PaaS and database services from a single console — an attractive proposition.

This news should be of interest to companies that want to experiment with PaaS and database services in an enterprise-class cloud, which is how Tier 3 positions its services. It also shows that the world isn’t standing still waiting for other IaaS players to get their acts together.

“Rackspace is barely getting their OpenStack IaaS up and running and here’s an IaaS running vCloud for more than a year and now offering PaaS,” said GigaOM Pro analyst Jo Maitland.

The 451 Group’s Tier1 researchers are also impressed. While acknowledging it’s still way early in the game for PaaS adoption, they wrote:

From IaaS to PaaS, Tier 3 is able to deliver a consistent enterprise cloud strategy with high availability, security and interoperability in mind. Whether it can transition enterprise IT managers, which are likely involved in early testing and development-type ad hoc cloud projects, to becoming PaaS customers in large numbers remains to be seen, but its offer of enterprise production support, platform automation and integration seems to match the demands of business organizations as they come to the end of the technology lifecycle.

Tier 3 has been busily expanding its business. In February, it announced a federated cloud platform that lets service providers deploy white-label clouds based on Tier3′s software and leverage the geographic footprint of other Tier 3 partners. That means, for example, that a service provider in Indiana could offer customers access to resources anywhere in the world where another Tier 3-based service provider is operating.

The state of the IaaS/PaaS market will doubtless come up at GigaOM’s Structure event in June where one panel will feature AppFog’s Lucas Carlson, DotCloud’s Solomon Hykes, and Derek Collison, the man behind Cloud Foundry and new co-founder and CEO of Apcera.

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Support for .NET is particularly critical given the large number of enterprise programmers that rely on the framework for developing Windows applications. Presently, Microsoft Windows Azure is the most widely known PaaS offering touting strong .NET support, but it is hindered in part by the platform’s usability and in part because it’s only a public cloud. Startup AppHarbor is also pushing a .NET PaaS. Iron Foundry, Tier3′s Cloud Foundry implementation, will allow new PaaS providers to offer support for .NET applications and also will give companies wanting to build their own internal PaaS offerings the code to get started (something Apprenda already does via its SaaSGrid Apprenda Platform product).

Technically, Iron Foundry and Cloud Foundry are separate at this point, but Tier3 and VMware acknowledge they are working together to align Iron Foundry with the core Cloud Foundry code and developer tools, and I have been told that VMware will officially support .NET within Cloud Foundry at some point.

Developers can access Iron Foundry via a Windows version of Cloud Foundry Explorer or a Visual Studio plug-in for Cloud Foundry, and the code will be available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. The company is also offering a “full testbed environment” that lets programmers experiment with Iron Foundry free for 90 days, although applications are limited to one web and one database instance apiece.

Tier3 is an IaaS provider by nature, and Iron Foundry is its foray into PaaS, which many consider the future of cloud computing. While Iron Foundry is still just a project like its Cloud Foundry namesake, Tier3 founder and CTO Jared Wray told me that Tier3 will have a PaaS product at some point, and Iron Foundry almost certainly will be at the core.

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