AppFog customers received an email today advising them that the PaaS company will no longer support applications hosted on Rackspace infrastructures (screen grab below).
We’ve been hearing through the back channel for quite some time that AppFog has been struggling to gain marketshare and revenue. Despite some high profile funding, and being in the sexiest of spaces, the company hasn’t managed to leverage its position to scale. I’m led to believe that the company was facing a cashflow cliff, in actual fact it has seriously downsized its headcount in recent months.
Given this email then, I see that there are two possibilities here:
- It’s simply a cost cutting measure designed to extend the company’s short cash runway. As someone said to me on twitter, “Extensive resource and low take up (high cost and low revenue?) isn’t good for a volume play like #PaaS“
- CEO Lucas Carlson has managed to find some money somewhere and whomever that money came from has a real commercial reason to shut off the Rackspace tap
This story will be updated as more news comes to hand.
