(Disclosure – I was an investor and director in Appsecute and am an Adviser to ActiveState)
Around 18 months ago I was introduced to Mark Cox and Tyler Power, two smart guys from my hometown who were building a PaaS management product around the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. The fact that anyone in Christchurch had heard of PaaS, let alone Cloud Foundry, was frankly amazing to me so I met up with the guys. I was immediately impressed by their pedigree and what they were doing and they quickly asked me to come on board as an adviser. I went one better and offered to invest in the company to help them build out their vision.
Over the next year or so they had some real success, there was a slight pivot into a really interesting developer social stream application and a lot of interest and uptake from developers all around the world. Alongside this interest came the obvious attention of vendors who were excited by what Appsecute was doing. That excitement culminated today in the announcement that development lifecycle and PaaS vendor ActiveState has acquired Appsecute and will pair the Appsecute social time line with ActiveState’s Stackato private PaaS.
The combination is logical – adding the social timeline to Stackato provides an integrated end to end solution for enterprise customers. The open nature of the Appsecute connector platform also introduces interesting potential for ActiveState customers to integrate solutions into the disparate systems they already use.
It’s news that is exciting for me on a number of levels – as an early backer of Appsecute I get to see their initial vision taken to a higher level with the addition of resource and market traction that ActiveState has. As an advocate for technology companies in New Zealand I see a local startup make good – and the local ecosystem benefit from the creation of what will become ActiveState’s New Zealand operation. Most of all though I’m excited that Cox and Tyler will be able to continue developing and growing the Appsecute community under the umbrella of the broader ActiveState organization.
Good work guys, job done. Now it’s time to get back to work and keep building.
