Apprenda is delivering a nuance to that conversation today with the announcement that it is powering JPMorgan Chase’s development and management of internal applications – on both the Apprenda standard, .NET, and Java. The second part of this announcement is something of a bombshell, I’ve known that Apprenda was working on a Java platform for many months now but to the public it will come as a major shock given the best of breed rhetoric from Apprenda to date. But it’s important to understand that Apprenda has never said that only one development language will meet all the needs of an organization – rather it says that an individual PaaS need to be deeply tailored to a particular language or framework – and, by extension, a PaaS vendor can deliver similarly deep functionality across more than one language.

It seems that this messaging, while outside the orthodox thinking around PaaS, is resonating where it matters, with customers. JPMorgan is using Apprenda across its more than 430 development teams and 2000 custom applications worldwide. According to Apprenda, this is the largest private PaaS implementation to date – a claim that, while unable to be verified exactly, rings true given the nascent nature of PaaS in general, and enterprise PaaS in particular.

The problems that drove JPMC to investigate PaaS in the first place will come as no surprise to anyone who has been listening to the contention of myself and others that PaaS is the future of application development:

• Long lead times for application deployment due to infrastructure provisioning and OS and software stack build and verification
• Inflexible capacity management that requires precise, upfront forecasting and has difficulty in meeting unexpected scaling needs
• Lack of effective cost control with large up-front cost requirements and severe under-utilization of physical and virtual infrastructure
• Redundant effort between development teams that cause developers to treat application architecture patterns, security configuration, high availability, and common services such as application caching as “one off” engagements rather than relying on standards

Apprenda’s platform, plugged into JPMC’s existing IT infrastructure, allowed the firm to move directly from raw infrastructure to a high level private PaaS cloud. JPMC reports that it benefits in the following ways from the move:

• Enterprise Grade – JPMC’s private cloud PaaS operates at a scale for thousands of applications and provides guaranteed availability and global failover—integrating seamlessly with existing IT investments
• “Just Bring Your App” PaaS – removed the friction between developers and IT through single click application deployment and isolating developers and their applications from the infrastructure
• Unprecedented Time to Market – application deployment was reduced from weeks to less than five minutes per application
• Fine Cost Control – created a way to allocate and assign surface resources to developers on an internal “pay as you go” model to keep costs in check and utilization to a maximum
• Standardization of Productivity and Architecture Patterns – achieved an unprecedented ability to write hundreds of new custom applications per year that would leverage the platform and support common application management, plus offer platform services such as messaging and caching and cloud architecture patterns

This can’t be articulated strongly enough, an enterprise like JPMC does due diligence to the extreme, and their comments are glowing in their positivity, This from Ian Penny, Global Head of Distributed Technology Engineering and Architecture:

The size of the JPMC application portfolio is large. We needed a proven, enterprise grade private cloud PaaS that could handle our scale for both .NET and Java. Apprenda has the technology that could deliver on the private PaaS vision of savings and agility, transforming the way we develop and run applications firmwide

This positivity is understandable when one sees some of the metrics since JPMC has deployed Apprenda:

• Application time to market improvement of 59 days
• Utilization increases on infrastructure from an average of 40% to 70%, resulting in a 45% drop in infrastructure costs
• 100% uptime to date with no unscheduled environment outages
• Standardization across development teams in terms of deployment and availability of standard application building blocks, resulting in massive boosts in developer productivity and agility

Apprenda is today announcing the new version of its Paas service. Apprenda is kind of the PaaS whipping boy – their focus on providing very deep single language solutions goes against the current polyglot orthodoxy. As such they’re having to spend lots of time justifying their perspective, which is kind of a shame since what they do, they do really well.

The new version speaks more to their focus on building out the sort of functionality enterprises need to adopt PaaS – specifically their single-click hybrid cloud support and news developer toolsets. Specific announcements today include:

• Enterprises Extend Datacenter to Windows Azure  – Apprenda connects Windows Server 2012 environments with cloud-based Windows Azure resources, creating a hybrid cloud PaaS approach for enterprises. Windows Azure users can use Apprenda to develop, deploy and manage cloud applications without conflict with private PaaS
• Single-Click Hybrid Cloud  – Apprenda believes enterprises want hybrid cloud architectures. In this release, IT can apply resource policies to infrastructure and applications rapidly, moving them with a simple single-click feature across the boundaries from private to public cloud
• Enterprises Easily Embrace Mobile, Other App Patterns  – As enterprises move to mobile, multi-tenant and other cloud application types, Apprenda 4.0 adds support for all Windows and Visual Studio integration and extends support for .NET 4.5, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012

MyPOV

Apprenda has a different perspective, in part because the fact they’re based on the East Coast results in them being much more attuned to an enterprise use-case focus rather than a more aspirational Silicon Valley view. Apprenda talks to real-world enterprises all day every day and these customers are advocating for private PaaS as a critical requirement for them to adopt PaaS. Going down a route that sees them deliver a consistent hybrid PaaS approach makes sense.

Of course there is the perennial best-of-breed versus polyglot argument. I sense that while Apprenda stands alone in the industry in this regard, that we’ll see a more credible and logical argument come from the company soon. The bottom line is a discussion on whether enterprises really want to settle on one set of tools, or if they want a variety of options fixed to their metaphorical tool belt. I can’t help but think that the latter is the case for most enterprises, and that Apprenda’s best of breed approach will see them gain some good uptake from a small selection of .NET focused enterprises, that long term they’ll need to broaden their customer based significantly.

In the short to medium term, Apprenda is delivering upon enterprises needs. I believe however that enterprises are going to move to a much more flexible and heterogeneous future sooner than Apprenda expects and it needs to think deeply about how it will enable this change to occur, without losing its “focus on doing one thins exceptionally well” approach.

Meanwhile Apprenda has been focused on delivering a highly functional .NET PaaS for its large enterprise customers – this focus on private PaaS has its benefits, after-all enterprises actually pay for stuff, but it’s not a great way to build awareness in the marketplace.

Apprenda is making a move to counter this factor by announcing the availability of ApprendaCloud, a free version of its private PaaS stack that, most importantly, is hosted in the public cloud. This isn’t quite as counter-intuitive as it seems. Apprenda has been fighting hard to get developer adoption, a couple of years ago they released their Apprenda Express product which was a downloadable PaaS product that developers could install themselves. However as Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller tells it, the vast difference between downloads and installs (roughly half of those downloading the product actually installed it) speaks to the barriers to entry that an installed product brings.

The discussion Apprenda hopes to encourage by providing this public cloud hosted product is one between developers and the IT departments of large enterprises. As Schuller rightly points out, some NYC based banks have upwards of 10000 developers working inside them – for these sorts of organizations public PaaS isn’t going to get real traction in the short term and hence private PaaS is the best option for them. By offering a free cloud-based product, Apprenda hopes to get developers using the product, and engaged with the IT organization to mandate its deployment internally as a private PaaS. When applications on ApprendaCloud are market ready, and more importantly the organization itself is satisfied that PaaS delivers value, users can download an on-premises install of Apprenda’s private PaaS. The Apprenda platform can then be consumed as a downloadable installer, virtual machine images, licensed product or PaaS service.

MyPOV

Schuller is right – private PaaS is a massive opportunity and one where significant value can be created. Large enterprises have massive development teams that would do well by leveraging the benefits that PaaS can bring. He’s also right that within the more traditional of enterprises, a PaaS deeply focused on a language like .NET makes sense. The logic goes that if you’re a .NET shop, you’re going to have a perception that a pure-play .NET offering is going to be a better fit for you than an offering supporting multiple languages.

The polyglot versus best of breed debate however is something of a red-herring – developers will use a solution that works, sometimes best of breed will fit that bill, sometimes polyglot will. In the journey to increased PaaS adoption however the key challenge is overcoming the significant hurdles to adoption – if private PaaS is a big offering, finding ways that both encourages developers to use the stuff, and meets the needs of corporate IT is a difficult balancing act.

ApprendaCloud is one answer to this problem and will help to at least build developer awareness and usage of Apprenda specifically. I suspect though that some of the bigger barriers to PaaS adoption lie in areas beyond the realm of the PaaS itself – cultural issues, the need for central management and monitoring and the maturity of individual platforms are also big barriers to greater adoption.

While it’s easy to say that ApprendaCloud is simply a knee jerk response to others providing an easy hosted PaaS product, it’s also a way for Apprenda to build some awareness and adoption – that’s good for Apprenda, good for the PaaS landscape generally and ultimately good for customers.

indications are that Microsoft sees this move as much broader than .NET, rather it’s an opportunity to go wide and attract large numbers of applications on Azure, regardless of language

This move gives hosters a freely available UX framework open which they can give their customers a consistent user experience between private/hosted clouds and public Azure. It is similar to a failed attempt by Microsoft a couple of years ago to offer an Azure Appliance – that time they were targeting large partners like Dell, HP and Fujitsu, but the offering never really took off and there was no strong message around offering end users the benefits of workload portability across a hybrid cloud.

With this move, Microsoft essentially introduces another option for hosters to consider when it comes to offering a cloud solution – and is another competitor to VMware’s vCloud, Citrix’ CloudSTack, the OpenStack consortium and other smaller players such as Eucalyptus. In fact GoDaddy is piloting Azure powered cloud products, GoDaddy announced its cloud offering powered by CloudStack last year – we’re yet to see whether Azure is replacing CloudStack or simply another offering alongside it.

Always one to jump on board when it comes to Microsoft announcements, Apprenda announced today that hosting providers who use the newly minted Microsoft Service Management Portal can seamlessly add Apprenda’s private PaaS to their list of offerings. This is a good win for Apprenda who are now able to extend their footprint into individual hosts and become part of those hosts service catalog.

Initially, Microsoft will be enabling hosting service providers to offer individual websites, SQL Server databases and Virtual Machines through the Service Management Portal. While this does set up the situation where Microsoft essentially enables hosters to compete with core Microsoft Azure products, it also allows for a wider Azure footprint and a much more consistent hybrid cloud story – which is a great counter to the hybrid cloud offerings such as those from HP and numerous other vendors.

MyPOV

This move sees Microsoft strongly move from being a company selling Azure services, to a company selling the idea of Azure as the cloud system of choice. In announcing the program, Satya Nadella, president of the Server and Tools business spoke to this move when he said that;

We’ve taken everything that we’ve learned from running data centers and services at a global scale to usher in the new era of the cloud OS…

At the moment there is a massive move for mind and marketshare and, as yet, no vendor or cloud system can claim it has really gained a predominant position when it comes to powering hybrid cloud. While AWS is winning in terms of public share, their hybrid story, through a partnership with Eucalyptus, was introduced far too late given the rise of the hybrid cloud phenomenon. OpenStack is a contender for this throne, and HP is spending huge amounts of resource to tell a hybrid cloud story based on top of OpenStack, but this too is a recent change and customers are arguably still sitting on the fence when it comes to assessing the long term maturity and stability of OpenStack. VMware has obvious wide adoption with vCloud, and has a couple of years head start on Microsoft, but in conversations with hosters that I’ve had, there would seem to be a degree of distrust around VMware – Microsoft will no doubt try and leverage this to get a footprint.

I’d expect this initiative to be rolled out further and over the next few months see the messaging of Azure more strongly centered on the Cloud Operating System theme – with this logical progression, foretold by moves over the past year or so, Microsoft will be clearly positioning itself as a direct competitor to the other cloud stacks out there – and more choice is better for eveyone.

In justifying the existence of private PaaS, Copeland explained that while PaaS may be revolutionary, limiting it to public infrastructure strongly reduces its ability to break out and drive enterprises value. Enterprises certainly want the value that PaaS can bring, but want PaaS to be done differently for their needs. To this end Stackato delivers a private PaaS, that gives customers flexibility around the cloud stack they use and also their hypervisor of choice.

In terms of this new release, Stackato now supports .NET applications, offers web-based visual cluster management, and delivers some performance improvements compared to previous versions. As far as polyglot language support goes, Stackato supports applications coded in development languages like Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Node.JS, Clojure, Scala and Erlang. Deploying .NET applications to Stackato is achieved via technology integration with the Iron Foundry platform: Stackato’s automatic configuration tool links with Iron Foundry to support .NET apps in a Stackato PaaS cloud.

In addition to support for .NET applications and under-the-hood performance improvements (like a faster app store and improved Heroku buildpack support), Stackato 2.0 introduces new product enhancements targeted specifically at the real-world enterprise:

• Advanced containerization technology secures cloud apps, but also conserves scale and capacity, meaning the apps run better in less virtual real estate (with multiple containers per VM).
• The enhanced Web Management Console now offers visual cluster administration: DevOps gain greater visibility into cloud applications deployment management with less administrative impact, meaning their devs can spend time coding instead of writing reports.

MyPOV

I believe that PaaS is the way of the future as it delivers higher levels of abstraction than does IaaS. That said, it’s also a fact that PaaS is a more difficult concept to articulate and hence uptake has been slower than one would have imagined. Part of the reason for this is that PaaS has more dependencies and complexities and hence is sometimes harder to shoehorn into an organization than simply using virtual servers. One of the ways that enterprises will start to use PaaS, and see the real benefits it can bring, is by vendors building as much flexibility into their applications as possible – this is where Stackato – as a PaaS that is deployable behind the firewall, supports all major cloud stacks, and is multi hypervisor and multi development language, comes in. Talking behind the scenes with organizations using PaaS, the value proposition that Stackato articulates is well appreciated and sufficiently flexible to actually jump on board with.

A big unknown in all of this is the longer-term intentions of VMware with regards CloudFoundry. There are three initiatives currently available out of VMware;

• CloudFoundry.org – the Open Source codebase
• CloudFoundry.com – the developer facing hosted PaaS
• Manages CloudFoundry – A hgiher service managed PaaS

The jury is still out however on what VMware’s longer term intentions are and many inside the community are quietly a little concerned that VMware will work hard to build an ecosystem, before crushing that ecosystem in order to meet their own objectives. It’s potentially because of this concern that I’m seeing a significant amount of partnering, even among competitors, in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. The challenge for all these players is to build sufficient momentum behind PaaS generally, and Cloud Foundry more specifically, to protect themselves in the event of something untoward happening with VMware.

Regardless of industry politics, the Stackato offering is compelling – at the recent DeployCon PaaS-focused conference we heard from Warner Music who are completely rebuilding their technology business on top of PaaS – the benefits they see in terms of agility, speed and reduce operational hassles are paying dividends. By providing enterprises with private PaaS for inside the organization, those benefits will be driven further.

AppFog on the other hand is a recent newcomer that, from its former days as a PHP PaaS, has broadened to be all things to all people. Built on top of CloudFoundry, AppFog is an important player in the burgeoning PaaS space. It is a strongly polyglot following platform and is happy to shout the fact from the rooftops.

Both providers are simultaneously releasing  (at least in both cases to a select group of customers with GA due in the next few months) a hybrid cloud solution for .NET. Essentially with these products, organizations can achieve symmetry between on-premise or private cloud and public Windows Azure. This is a big deal as hybrid cloud, and in particular the idea of moving workloads more easily between traditional and public cloud infrastructure takes hold. This product will prove attractive for existing customers, as well as organizations with applications written in other languages who want to move onto Microsoft Azure. The solutions enable companies to sidestep the debate around public versus private cloud and run their applications wherever they see fit.

In terms of functional breadth, Apprenda Azure provides enterprises with new hybrid cloud capabilities, such as:

• The transitioning of applications and workloads between Windows Azure and internal data center resources
• Simplified IT management with the ability to pool both public and private infrastructure resource, define usage policies, and more, all from a single dashboard
• Increased developer productivity through frameworks and APIs integrated with Visual Studio to accelerate application development and deployment to internal or external infrastructure resources

AppFog on the other hand promises;

• Interoperability of cloud service providers
• Extended developer language and service support for AppFog and Windows Azure customers including support for Enterprise .NET, PHP and Node.js applications
• A new, simple and flexible approach for open source developers to try Windows Azure

In articulating the value of their Azure functionality, Schuller said that;

Hybrid cloud is the end state for enterprises. Instead of fragmented capabilities split between public and private cloud infrastructure, enterprises receive full-scope benefits without previous lock-in limitations or added risk. With Apprenda Azure, enterprises get the ability to merge their public Azure resources with their datacenters, getting the best of public and private cloud for .NET all under one umbrella.

AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson reall talks up how big this is in terms of moving CloudFoundry across may different infra providers;

CloudFoundry has created an industry standard API around PaaS, AppFog working together with Microsoft has proven that the API can be implemented across wildly different backend providers, creating consistency and reducing vendor lock-in for developers.

MyPOV

Polyglot PaaS makes total sense from the perspective of delivering to the widest possible audience, no one is denying the real strength that Microsoft holds with enterprise developers. While a polyglot PaaS supporting .NET could arguably deliver the same functional strength as a pure-play .NET PaaS, the perception amongst developers is that best of breed is just that, the best tool for their particular language of choice.Given that Apprenda is both articulating a pure play .NET story and also with this release a strongly hybrid-centric one, I believe that Apprenda Azure will see the company gain more attention, credibility and ultimately customer success.

That said, indications are that Microsoft sees this move as much broader than .NET, rather it’s an opportunity to go wide and attract large numbers of applications on Azure, regardless of language. That’s a pretty strong blow to those (Apprenda in particular) asserting a best of breed position. I put this hypothetical situation to Schuller who said that;

it [developments like the AppFog deal] could be a bonafide hybrid competitor to us, but in a weak market position since its primary sponsor (VMware) is Microsoft’s biggest enemy. Because of this, a CloudFoundry based competitor would not be aligned with Microsoft and would unlikely fill the market gap of helping enterprises bridge into Azure over time, putting them at a significant strategic disadvantage (I.e. our goal is to help people adopt Azure, theirs would not be, thereby nullifying their market position in he context of Microsoft)

Schuller has a point, but while AppFog is built on CloudFoundry, all things being equal they are more than happy for customers to move to Azure. I’m sure there were some strong discussions about the issue between the two parties with the agreement that the fact that AppFog is built on top of an arch rival’s product should be put to the side in the interests of gaining mutual customers. What that means for Apprenda only time will tell.

For someone who follows the machinations of the PaaS world pretty carefully – these are two exciting, and fascinating, pieces of news.

This then raises some opportunities for companies looking to aid in the creation of .NET applications but on cloud infrastructure, and without the concerns about managing underlying infrastructure. While it is true that Microsoft itself is going “all out” (or was it “all in”?) to get with the cloud – it’s probably fair to say that Azure hasn’t been the stellar success that one would have expected from Redmond.

This is where App Harbor comes in – quite simply, AppHarbor is Heroku for .NET – in the same way that Heroku allows Ruby developers to concentrate on code and forget almost entirely about servers, so to does AppHarbor aim to offer the same value to .NET developers. Founded only last September, AppHarbor had a prototype in December and pushed out a public beta in January of this year. They’re not shy about stating their case – the AppHarbor website says in no uncertain terms that they are “Azure done right”.

AppHarbor was founded by three Danes, Rune Sørensen, Troels Thomsen and Michael Friis. I spent some time talking with Friis in advance of a product announcement from them. Firstly we had a bit of a chat about the rationale behind, and motivation for, App Harbor. After that we delved into the product annjounement itself.

Friis wasn’t shy to tell about the deep relationship they have with the folks from Heroku. he even admitted that when development opportunitites, roadmap priorities nd other questions become apparent – AppHarbor makes their decisions using a simple test – “what would Heroku have done?” More than simple role-modeling however, it’s safe to say that Heroku (and it’s impressive exit to salesforce) showed the world the way to build a successful PaaS ecosystem – AppHarbor could do plenty worse than follow Heroku’s lead. Like heroku, AppHarbor gives developers infrasturture management through the following process;

AppHarbor are today announcing another move that follows one taken by Heroku – they are setting up an add-on program that closely resembles hat of heroku. In fact they are even going so far as to emulate the Heroku add-on program API so that add-ons can work with either PaaS. That’s super useful for developers who want to use tools such as MongoHQ, Redis and Cloudant. It’s also an oppoturtnity for .NET specific add-ons such as RavenDB to become part of an ecosystem that is aiming to change the world for .NET developers. The add-on gives the following;

AppHarbor is doing exciting things – it’s not a stretch to imagine a nice exit for the founders in the imminent future. That’s be my pick anyway.

In light of the change, and having given a few months for the Heroku deal to settle in, I spent some time with Tom Mornini, CTO and co-founder and Mike Piech, vice president of product management and marketing from Engine Yard to get a general update and have a specific discussion about the free trial.

I started off by asking what the Heroku deal meant for Engine Yard – Mornini was very positive, saying that it really was a validation for the Ruby PaaS approach and has been net positive for EngineYard themselevs. I suggested that perhaps the free trial move was a way to lure some developers away from Heroku, in part due to the under-current of discontent at the acquisition. Mornini denied this – he was uick to differentiate Engine Yard’s free trial approach to the freemium approach of Heroku saying that they see Heroku as the “junk yard for applications” – that since it is free, developers just leave essentially dead applications in place because it is easier. in fact Mornini even quipped that Engine Yard previously referred to Heroku as their own trial account location, given that developers would try the Ruby PaaS concept for free on Heroku and then move to paid accounts with Engine Yard once the trial had been proven.

I then spent some time talking more about the developer ecosystem – Engine Yard are pretty damning of both Java and .NET, going so far as to say that they are both dead languages that will not survive the move to the cloud. I can’t say I agree with this contention – my friends at Expanz (among others) are doing some good work helping .NET applications (and developers) play in this brave new world.

Finally I asked what Engine Yard thought was the rationale behind the Heroku acquisition – if they were reluctant to criticize Heroku, they weren’t so reserved about force.com. Mornini suggested that the ApEx language specifically and force.com generally have been failures in the marketplace, used for little more than customization of salesforce itself. They also indicated some doubt as to how slaesforce would meaningfully integrate Heroku into what they’re currently doing – by way of proof they talked of some marketing messaging they had received as salesforce VCRM customers that was entirely ignorant of what Heroku really meant for salesforce.

In terms of the free trial – Engine Yard has done a good thing – I suspect this move will gain them significant customers and that will help build their credibility and mindshare going forwards.