
Deploycon, PaaS & the pending data tier gravity fallout…
For a quick recap of last years Deploycon & related talks, check out my “Day #3 => DeployCon && Enterprise && Data Gravity” entry from last year. PaaS Systems aren’t always effectively distributed. Heroku has fallen over every time east-1 has gone down at AWS. Not that I’m saying they’ve done bad, just pointing that […]

Continuity Rolls Out Public Beta of its Big Data PaaS
When Continuuity launched late last year I was pretty skeptical given the buzzword heavy press release, light on any real specifics. After spending some time talking with the founders however I was more positive, and not only because of the princely $10M funding round the company had just raised. As I said at the time: […]

Apprenda Shifts the Game on Polyglot Vs Best of Breed PaaS
One of the biggest battles raging in the PaaS world has been between the Polyglot and the Best of Breed camps. In the polyglot corner stands Heroku, Engine Yard and Cloud Foundry who all say that only a platform that gives an organization the ability to develop in multiple different

Tensions in the Cloud Foundry Camp–On the Problems with Forks
Let there be no doubt, open source projects are hard. Balancing central control while still allowing individual members a degree of autonomy is like walking a tightrope – too much control and it looks like a dictatorship, too little and the initiative risks spiraling out of control in the face

Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further […]

Top Five Challenges Facing Enterprise Application Developers
Several common themes have emerged from discussions with a broad array of enterprise developers. In this post, I’ll share some of what I’ve been hearing. I would love to get your feedback. 1) Cloud Apps are Hard to Get Right – While abstraction of infrastructure has helped agility and application management, it doesn’t make it […]

PaaS and Mobile Enterprise – Real Conversations with Customers
One of the benefits of working on cutting edge technology like PaaS is that I get to have conversations with enterprise customers about the transformations that PaaS will bring. Increasingly, I’m seeing lots of interest in the intersection of PaaS and mobile enterprise (yeah, it’s not just an attempt by me to put together two buzzwords!). […]

A Conversation on Cloud Computing, PaaS, Distributed Systems & Marketing Message Cleanups…
This video is a discussion between Ben Kepes @benkepes, Clive Boulton @ic, Rakesh Malhotra @rakeshm and Sam Johnston @samj. We tackle recent cloud computing trends, PaaS, distributed systems and cleaning up messaging around the mess marketing has made of “cloud”. Cloud Computing, PaaS, Distributed Systems and Cleaning the Marketing Mess from Adron Hall on Vimeo. […]

PaaS Pivot: Big Data At The Core Of Platform Services
As we go into 2013, I keep thinking about the evolution of the Platform as a Service and wonder what is in store for this segment this year. As Platform Services are one of my core focus areas of research, I thought I will start off this year with a post on this topic. For […]

Force.com and the Uber-Democratization of Programming
In the last few weeks I’ve started to riff on James Govenor’s meme, that of developers becoming the new kingmakers. I recently wrote a post discussing what I saw happening with Salesforce – how the combination of force.com and Heroku was creating a real gravity pull for developers and that Salesforce was primed to be […]

Moving PaaS Beyond the Sound Bites in 2013
Most of the discussion around PaaS these days tends to focus on the rapid application deployment capabilities. That’s the easiest thing to demo in a 3-minute video so it tends to get the headlines. I believe that in 2013 we will move on from this eye candy and dig into some of the higher value […]

HP Announces Private PaaS Powered by Stackato
At HP’s Discover event here in Frankfurt today, the company will be announcing a private PaaS offering, built on top of Stackato, the PaaS which is itself a fork of the open source Cloud Foundry initiative. HP has entered into an agreement with ActiveState, the company behind Stackato, to OEM its platform and integrate it […]

Why CloudFoundry Spin Off Is Interesting
The rumors are true with VMware publicly announcing that CloudFoundry will be spun off as a separate organization along with EMC’s Greenplum and VMware’s vFabric. This unit will be headed by Paul Maritz, former CEO of VMware. This leaves VMware to focus on their Software Defined DataCenter initiative which they announced during last VMworld. I […]
Heroku Joins Cloud Foundry for Multi-PaaS Support from Appsecute
Let’s settle two things from the outset – firstly, PaaS is (I believe) the future of cloud services and will be the area for growth in the coming years. Secondly, I’m an investor and board member in Appsecute so I’m naturally bullish about what they’re doing. That said, today’s announcement

Apprenda Launches Hybrid Cloud Support
CloudBeat is all about customer case studies and not about vendor announcements, that said I am aware of a couple of announcements coming up today in the PaaS space.