The 20 Coolest Cloud Platform And Development Vendors Of The 2016 Cloud 100
Coolest Cloud Platform And Development Vendors For 2015
Just about every business out there is undergoing some degree of digital transformation. We live in an age of software, and organizations are realizing they can't always procure best-fit solutions off-the-shelf. What enterprise users need are applications highly tuned to harmonize with their business strategy, their brand, and their unique workflows and processes.
For that reason, development and cloud management platforms have become essential components of most IT environments. And while the many cloud platforms on the market are highly diverse in form and function, they all share a common objective.
What CRN's 20 Coolest Cloud Platform and Development Vendors have in common is they all empower their customers to create, deploy and manage applications uniquely suited for their organizations without having to hire teams of software engineers to write tens of thousands of lines of code, then wait months to launch.
If you missed it, check out the vendors in the other categories of The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2016.
AppDirect
Daniel Saks, President, Co-CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
AppDirect helps resellers identify best-of-breed SaaS products and offers them a customizable platform for deploying curated, self-branded online marketplaces to distribute those apps to customers. An online portal enables back-end functionality such as reporting and billing management.
CloudBees
Sacha Labourey, CEO
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif
While CloudBees exited the Platform-as-a-Service market more than a year ago and discontinued its RUN @ cloud service, the company's hosted Jenkins platform, DEV @ cloud, is running stronger than ever. CloudBees is laser-focused on delivering the open-source continuous integration software to developers through the cloud.
cloudControl
Philipp Strube, CEO
Headquarters: Berlin, Germany
A few years back, cloudControl took the dotCloud Platform-as-a-Service off the hands of an at-the-time unknown startup called Docker. The dotCloud platform, designed for cloud-native application development employing service-oriented architecture, became the basis for the German software developer's expansion in the US market.
Cloudera
Thomas Reilly, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Cloudera's big data platform helps customers add advanced analytic capabilities to production environments. The company offers a hosted, managed, compliant and secure version of Cloudera's Hadoop distribution, making it easier to take advantage of the open-source data-crunching technology.
Egenera
Pete Manca, CEO
Headquarters: Boxborough, Mass.
The cloud management software vendor offers Xterity, a managed cloud platform designed with the needs of MSPs and the broader IT channel in mind. Xterity, built from the Egenera Cloud Suite, allows resellers to design, price and manage multicloud application environments.
Engine Yard
Beau Vrolyk, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Engine Yard's platform simplifies the work of building, deploying and managing applications across complex IT environments. Developers can take advantage of automation and orchestration engines to quickly get custom solutions into production and ready to scale.
InsideSales
David Elkington, CEO
Headquarters: Provo, Utah
For a decade, InsideSales honed predictive analytics tools that employed machine-learning algorithms and troves of contextual data. Last year, the company released Predictive Cloud, a platform that partners and customers can use to deploy unique predictive apps for driving more effective sales interactions.
Jelastic
Ruslan Synytsky, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif. and Malaga, Spain
Jelastic -- a portmanteau of Java and Elastic -- has developed a highly scalable Platform-as-a-Service built atop Linux container infrastructure. The company has coined the term Platform-as-Infrastructure to describe the combination of IaaS and PaaS technologies it offers cloud hosting providers.
Nintex
John Burton, CEO
Headquarters: Bellevue, Wash.
This fast-growing Microsoft technology partner brings to market a platform for workflow automation that makes it easy for organizations to script workflows that implement core business practices. A partner portal launched last year attracted an influx of new resale partners to Nintex's channel.
Oracle
Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, Co-CEOs
Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.
The software giant has heavily invested in its cloud offerings of late. Oracle Cloud Platform, the Platform-as-a-Service component, includes middleware, database, Java, security and identity-management services that enable integrating and extending SaaS applications and consolidating cloud-native applications with existing legacy ones.
Orbitera
Marcin Kurc, CEO
Headquarters: West Hollywood, Calif.
Orbitera sells a powerful e-commerce development platform that enables multichannel software and cloud infrastructure delivery. The Orbitera Marketplace Platform automates the process of building online marketplaces and bundling cloud services, and enables customers to manage the solutions they purchase.
OutSystems
Paulo Rosado, CEO
Headquarters: Atlanta
OutSystems, founded in Portugal, delivers a Platform-as-a-Service, including management and analytics tools, for developing Web and mobile applications. The Rapid Application Delivery (RAD) platform is a low-code development environment for rapidly pulling together and delivering applications that can easily integrate with custom-coded applications, existing systems and data sources.
Pivotal
Paul Maritz, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Pivotal, a spin-off of EMC and VMware, owns Cloud Foundry, the Platform-as-a-Service that is storming through enterprise IT operations centers. While a host of other name-brand vendors started bringing Cloud Foundry to market after Pivotal open-sourced the technology, Pivotal still offers the most popular commercial distribution.
Progress Software
Phil Pead, CEO
Headquarters: Bedford, Mass.
Progress Software offers the easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy Progress Pacific Platform for application development and governance. Pacific enables not only developers, but also business leaders, to quickly build cloud-native and data-intensive Web and mobile applications using simple drag-and-drop tools.
Puppet Labs
Luke Kanies, Founder, CEO
Headquarters: Portland
This configuration management software vendor offers Puppet Enterprise, a commercially supported version of its open-source orchestration platform that automates cloud management. Puppet Enterprise creates a PaaS-style provisioning service with change monitoring and management orchestration from a single console.
Red Hat
Jim Whitehurst, CEO
Headquarters: Raleigh, N.C.
Red Hat is the commercial entity behind OpenShift, a Platform-as-a-Service that gives developers tools to quickly build, host and scale applications in cloud environments. The open-source leader also sells the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform for developing and deploying mobile apps.
Salesforce
Marc Benioff, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
The CRM leader invested early in building out an advanced application development platform for its channel pros. Salesforce1, which combined several platform technologies, including Heroku, a trailblazing PaaS, offers an environment for developing novel customer-facing applications and extending Salesforce's SaaS clouds.
ServiceNow
Frank Slootman, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
The ServiceNow Platform, which includes an application development studio with prebuilt services and templates, gives organizations the ability to automate their line of business and IT processes and deploy service management solutions in the cloud through forms-based workflows.
Software AG
Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO
Headquarters: Darmstadt, Germany
The German software veteran offers the webMethods AgileApps Platform-as-Service, a cloud-based application development platform that enables small and midsize customers to quickly build process-driven applications by stacking a set of building blocks. The technology is the progeny of Software AG's acquisition of LongJump.
Zoho
Sridhar Vembu, CEO
Headquarters: Pleasanton, Calif.
This pioneering SaaS vendor offers Creator, a simple drag-and-drop platform for building and publishing online database applications. Zoho Creator can be used to build custom Web and mobile applications, automate workflows and generate customized analytic reports for actionable insights.