With the multitude of PaaS vendors that now exist, most providing an all-things-to-all-people polyglot solution that is (in my view at least) largely undifferentiated from their competitors, there is an increasing focus on vendors making partnerships that allows them to build both mindshare and market penetration.

The latest is ActiveState who has announced that their PaaS, Stackato, is supported on HP Cloud Services. Stackato is a private PaaS that enables deployment, scaling, and management of Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Node.js, Scala, and Clojure applications. With Stackato, customers can deploy an application to either a private internal cloud or a third party cloud. Stackato is built atop Cloud Foundry and is already supported on vSphere and EC2 and is soon to roll out OpenStack support.

 

The HP announcement is interesting as, while the HP Cloud Service is still in private beta, cloud pundits watch and wait with interest to see how these offerings from “traditional” vendors play out. The HP solution is a combination of HP hardware and services built on top of OpenStack. So in a roundabout way, with this announcement Stackato gets both the credibility of the HOP angle, but also arguably the greater benefit of the OpenStack support which enables a wealth of new partnerships.

This is a good partnership (with the usual limitation that it’s hard to make totally definitive statements about the support for what is still a beta product. PaaS vendors need to broaden what they do, as Bare Copeland from ActiveState says;

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for enterprises that are demanding different options for their cloud infrastructure, adding support for HP Cloud Services to Stackato reinforces our vision of providing the PaaS layer in the cloud that supports any underlying infrastructure, which will greatly benefit enterprise developers and IT/DevOps by giving them the options and flexibility they want.

Now the challenge that ActiveSteate, and other vendors have is to articulate their offering in a differentiated and consistent way. But that’s a challenge for another day.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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