Details are scarce since AppFog had no comment and Savvis could not be reached for comment but sources with knowledge of the deal expect the news to be announced Monday. Founded in 2010, AppFog garnered about $10 million in venture funding from Ignition Partners, Xen founder Simon Crosby, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op.

Given that Savvis is a big VMware vSphere and vCloud Director partner, AppFog could give it a “house brand” PaaS of its own. AppFog’s PaaS builds atop standard Cloud Foundry technology, which came out of VMware. Its pitch was that AppFog abstracted out messy details of base cloud infrastructure so developers could move their apps from Amazon to Rackspace to HP or other public clouds at will. That eliminated cloud lock-in at least at the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer. In April, however, AppFog dropped support for Rackspace and seemed to be narrowing its focus.

At the time, word was that VMware’s decision to spin off Cloud Foundry to Pivotal and offer it as a commercial PaaS hurt members of the ecosystem — including ActiveState, Uhuru and AppFog — it had recruited to build PaaSes atop that technology. That led to talk of a possible fork of Cloud Foundry.

Given this news, it looks like AppFog technology will be more tightly wedded to Savvis/VMware infrastructure, but no one’s saying.

PaaS as a category hasn’t gained a ton of traction in the enterprise — even some in the market concede that it lacks a killer app to convince CIOs to buy into the concept. Developers at companies often use these platforms hosted on outside cloud infrastructure to build and test software but when the time comes to deploy, the apps typically come in-house.

Pivotal trotted out General Electric’s $105 million investment in its new venture as proof that enterprise adoption of PaaS is on the upswing. Red Hat this week made its enterprise-focused OpenShift PaaS generally available. OpenShift adoption could be a bellwether for the category.

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Google announced the new service on its Android Developers and Cloud Platform blogs, describing it as “a one-click deployable, complete mobile backend that allows you to reap the benefits of a cloud backend with none of the headaches. It provides a ready-to-deploy, general purpose cloud backend and a general purpose client-side framework for Android.”

Google’s new service is hardly the first on the market, though, and it’s nowhere near the broadest. The market for providing what some call “mobile backend as a service” has been growing in popularity over the past couple years as smartphone use has proliferated. The classic infrastructure-as-a-service and even platform-as-a-service clouds have been a godsend to many web and early mobile startups, but many mobile developers just want something even simpler, it appears.

Mobile Backend Starter joins the aforementioned Parse, as well as other offerings from startups such as Appcelerator, Kinvey, Flurry and StackMob. All of these services offer broader feature sets and support for numerous mobile platforms beyond Android. Google’s prevailing thinking seems to be, though, that if you’re developing apps for Android, there’s no better place to do it than with the company who created the operating system.

In fact, Google is just the latest of bigger, badder vendors getting into the MbaaS space: Rackspace and Salesforce.com did so earlier this year and, if Amazon Web Services job postings are to be believed, the king of public cloud is also eyeing entry into this space.

Technically, Google unveiled Mobile Backend Starter during a talk at Google I/O last month, but apparently word didn’t spread much beyond the walls of that room. David Chandler, one of the Google developers who gave the presentation, has collected a number of additional resources here, on his personal blog.

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The software line includes a trio of components that function on their own but can work well together: a tool for collaborating and laying out the functions, processes, inputs and outputs of an application; a system for assembling and tweaking pieces of the application itself; and a vehicle for integrating data from existing applications. The applications that come out of Software AG Live can also run on mobile devices, which falls in with the trend of using PaaSes to build mobile apps.

AgileApps Live is the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) component of the new Software AG Live product line.

With this PaaS, “subject-matter experts are now empowered to build their own solutions and apps,” said Ivo Totev (pictured), head of Software AG’s cloud business unit and a member of the company’s executive board.

The platform is available now, and the other pieces are on the way. They will all be able to run on the Software AG cloud hosted on Rackspace, a spokesman said, but can be deployed on other clouds or on premises.

Last month SoftwareAG said that it had acquired LongJump, which previously provided part of the new software bundle. Now, a few weeks later, Software AG is turning around and announcing the full line under a new name.

“This really opens up some new potential audiences to Software AG,” said John Rymer, a Forrester Research VP and principal analyst focusing on application development. “If they can get the integration right, they can actually offer a pretty broad spectrum of development experiences and runtimes compared to the competition.” Competitors in the area of visual and cloud-based platforms for application development include Mendix, Rymer said.

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@WalmartLabs gave people a glimpse at its playbook on Tuesday by disclosing in a blog post the acquisition of OneOps, a finalist in the LaunchPad competition at GigaOM’s 2012 Structure conference, as well as Tasty Labs, whose CEO, Joshua Schachter, founded Delicious.

Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

According to the @WalmartLabs blog post, OneOps has “developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that enables us to significantly accelerate our PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies.” The OneOps acquisition could strengthen Wal-Mart’s chances of rapidly building, tinkering with, testing and deploying new applications onto walmart.com and other online retail sites affiliated with the company, such as samsclub.com. The unification of the back-end components of many sites is an ongoing project for Wal-Mart.

As for the Tasty Labs buy, it could lead to additional social experiences for site visitors. Wal-Mart has been incorporating social elements into its sites, such as pins from Pinterest as well as recently reviewed and fast-moving items. But with Tasty Labs’ Jig product, customers have been able to type in their needs and get responses about products that could help meet said needs.

However Wal-Mart ends up making use of OneOps and Tasty Labs, the company could well keep acquiring companies as it strives to enhance its hardware and software arsenal. Wal-Mart might find a new acquisition target at this year’s Structure conference, coming up on June 19-20 in San Francisco, where another batch of companies will compete in the LaunchPad event, including Factor.io, Mertica and SaltStack.

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PostGIS is an extension to the PostgreSQL database that many developers use on Heroku’s platform as a service. According to a blog post announcing PostGIS 2.0 support in beta form, Heroku’s Craig Kerstiens wrote:

“PostGIS 2.0 will enable a new class of Heroku applications that leverage location data. Whether you are looking to compute walkability scores to nearby schools, target ads based on GPS locations, or search for apartments by specific neighborhoods PostGIS can help make you build richer functionality into your application more easily.”

Heroku’s sales pitch is that using PostGIS with Postgres gives developers more resources while cutting the number of services they might require.

For example, a developer who might have in the past turned to a proprietary tool like ESRI’s ArcGIS, and then manage that along with the rest of the stack can now stay with an open-source option tightly linked to the database of choice. That means reduced complexity and the ability to build richer location-based functions faster. At its most basic level, PostGIS support means you can perform spatial queries and analysis on your data.

And that could mean more useful apps. Instead of an app that shows you on a map where the nearest Peet’s Coffee is, you could get the best walking route to that location factoring in terrain and real world traffic or other data, according to Kerstiens.

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While helping users host applications on five public clouds was one of Appfog’s main selling points, “it’s also become increasingly resource-intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. He referred users to the AppFog Console, which will enable them to clone their application onto new target infrastructure.

Carlson could not be reached for comment Monday morning, but, Generally speaking, PaaS adoption by business users has been sketchy at best. Many developers love PaaS because it makes development and testing very easy, but once the applications are built, many companies prefer to run them in-house (i.e., not on a public cloud). And, more specifically, there have been rumors  that AppFog was seeking investment or even a potential buyout.

AppFog tried to end-run that argument by allowing deployment on private clouds as well, but it’s unclear how well that effort has gone. There has also been angst among companies, including AppFog, that built their PaaS offerings atop the Cloud Foundry framework. That was true when Cloud Foundry resided under VMware, and remains true since it was spun off to Pivotal, which is now selling its own Cloud Foundry PaaS that competes with third-party options.

I’ve reached out to Carlson for comment and will update this story when he responds.

Update: Carlson would not comment on rationale for dropping Rackspace but did say that AppFog has hundreds of paying customers and that his goal is to “build a big company in a big space.” AppFog still supports Amazon Web Services in three regions — North America, Europe and Asia as well as HP’s cloud.

This story was updated at 7:25 a.m. PST with Carlson’s comment.

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In a blog post, Heroku’s Zeke Sikelianos said the platform-as-a-service oufit had been seeing great demand from the non-U.S. world, and its second region was now live as a public beta, following a private beta with customers such as Swedish television network TV4.

“Deploying our app closer to our users in Heroku’s Europe region gave us a 150ms improvement in web performance. Based on this win for our users, we’re moving all of our apps to the Europe region,” the post quoted TV4 CTO Per Åström as saying.

The European region, which runs out of Amazon’s Irish data center, comes with all the same features as the U.S. region. Over 60 add-ons are already available for the region, such as Heroku Postgres and ClearDB, and others are on their way. The company has introduced heroku fork to its command-line interface in order to ease the migration of apps from the U.S. region, by copying relevant data and configuration variables.

Data location

European data protection laws are more stringent than those in the U.S., so the two parties have set up a Safe Harbor program for American companies whose services involve the handling of EU citizens’ personal data. Heroku still isn’t part of that program, so technically it’s still not kosher to run services for EU citizens on the platform, even though it’s now using an EU data center.

“Heroku is not yet a registered participant in the Safe Harbor program,” the post read. “We’ve laid the groundwork for becoming Safe Harbor certified and expect to have it soon.

“The Europe region public beta is designed to let you build high-performance apps for European users. It does not currently address data residency or jurisdiction concerns. You should assume that some portions of your app and its data will be in, or pass through, data centers located in the U.S.”

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Salesforce says developers using its tools can build apps that tap into troves of legacy data from existing CRM customers.

Given these developments, and rumblings that public cloud king Amazon Web Services is gearing up its mobile development push, it looks like legacy cloud giants are crowding into a space pioneered by smaller, more focused providers of mobile back-end services. (GigaOM Pro analyst Janakiram MSV has a good take on choosing an MBaaS here — subscription required.)

Who needs an MBaaS?

Salesforce.com’s pitch is that, while there are tons of useful consumer mobile apps, enterprise apps to date are still lacking.  ”It’s hard to build mobile apps that don’t just look nice but are engaging and that comes down to data. They need to be connected into your work data,” said Adam Seligman, VP of developer relations at Salesforce.com. “You have to make it easy to build the apps, the client side stuff, but you also need those hooks into corporate data.”

The new mobile packs, which support three lightweight mobile frameworks — jQuery Mobile, Backbone.js and AngularJS — should help on the ease-of-development front.

Salesforce, which backs both Force.com and Heroku Platforms as a Service (PaaS), subscribes to the school of thought that a specialized Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) — from Parse, Kinvey, Kii or Stackmob — isn’t necessary. Those smaller competitors would no doubt argue that developers need to build applications that connect to myriad applications from many sources — not just those from one company.

Rackspace wraps up mobile stack in an easily deployable package

Rackspace already hosts “tons of mobile apps” but it wants to make it easier for developers and companies to deploy and run them, CTO John Engates said. So the San Antonio, Texas-based company wrapped up a mobile-focused technology stack as a sort of prepackaged cloud for that type of user.

“We want to streamline things. We put together a stack — including Linux, MySQL, PHP, Memcached, Varnish cache in a sort of blueprint that we can deploy consistently and quickly,” he said.

This backend runs in Rackspace’s public cloud infrastructure, but on cloud servers that are dedicated to that customer. “We’re basically running a single tenant infrastructure on a multi-tenant cloud,” Engates said. “Heroku is a multi-tenant platform that lives on Amazon, a multi-tenant infrastructure cloud. We’re trying to build a single-tenant platform atop a public cloud so you can build your own deployment and spec and scale it for what you need.”

Rackspace CTO John Engates

The entire stack is open source and developers can use their SDKs of choice to develop for any mobile device. Rackspace has also signed up some partners to work with its stack: FeedHenry, New Relic, Sencha, SOASTA, StackMob and Trigger.io.

“The idea there is you use our infrastructure but then SOASTA can test your application from many perspectives — not just Rackspace — and throw a load up there to make sure it scales before you deploy it,” Engates said.

Bring on the consolidation

As more of these bigger, broader “cloud” companies add mobile development and hosting capabilities, it may be time for consolidation in the MBaaS business to kick off for real.

Forrester senior analyst Michael Facemire said consolidation in the MBaaS space, which started to happen last year with Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish, will likely heat up now that these bigger players finally see how important mobile developers are to the future of their overall businesses.

And, it will be extremely interesting to see what Google has up its sleeve vis-a-vis Google App Engine (GAE). Oracle, a power among enterprise applications, will be another company to watch.

This story was updated at 7:50 a.m. PST with analyst comment

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The Santa Clara, Calif. company has also signed deals with a handful of integration partners that give it broad geographic coverage. They are: Redapt, based in Redmond, Wash.; Cloud Technology Partners out of Boston: CloudOps of Montreal; Shapeblue in London; Cloud Niners in Egypt with another integrator in Asia to be announced soon, Soby said.

Cumulogic’s rather ambitious pitch is that it will enable companies to mix and match cloud services from many providers and run them on the cloud infrastructure of the customers’ choice whether it’s VMware’s vCloud Director, Cloudstack (Citrix was an early investor), OpenStack or Amazon Web Services. Cumulogic also claims that service providers or enterprises themselves can manage all of those choices from the proverbial “single pane of glass.” That’s a big promise.

“If a developer wants to deploy MongoDB against Amazon and a load balancer against Rackspace, he can do that through our platform,” Soby said in an interview.

And, for the many companies still nervous about deploying critical applications in the public cloud, it will also let them re-create AWS-style pay-as-you-go services inside their firewalls, Soby said. A pre-release version of Cumulogic Cloud running on HPCloud is available here.

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