The 20 Coolest Cloud Platform And Development Vendors Of The 2017 Cloud 100
Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors For 2017
Businesses discovering the emerging competitive landscape requires them to build and deploy software rapidly are increasingly turning to Platform-as-a-Service solutions to power their digital transformations.
Cloud-based development platforms abstract from the often-burdensome work of provisioning virtual machines and managing infrastructure, freeing up enterprise developers, and sometimes nontechnical users, to focus on designing applications that serve the needs of their employees, customers and partners.
A new generation of these platforms are facilitating development of mobile and Internet of Things solutions. At the same time, container tech is playing a major role in reshaping this category, and many legacy PaaS providers are incorporating the technology to provide their users more diverse resources for building cloud-native applications.
Check out the rest of The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2017.
Appian
Matt Calkins, CEO
Headquarters: Reston, Va.
Appian offers a number of intuitive visual tools and services that bridge IT and business units, helping enterprises rapidly deploy multichannel mobile applications. The platform minimizes the need for coding and enables rapid scaling of the underlying resources supporting the mobile applications it hosts.
Apprenda
Sinclair Schuller, CEO
Headquarters: Troy, N.Y.
Apprenda's platform is commonly leveraged by developers building .Net and Java applications for private clouds. The platform also supports Linux container technologies, like Kubernetes, for deploying applications with micro-services architectures. The company counts as customers some of the world's largest banks, technology companies and health-care providers.
AppScale
Woody Rollins, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Barbara, Calif.
AppScale's open-source implementation of Google App Engine can be deployed on public or private clouds. The API-driven platform allows Google customers to migrate App Engine workloads to other providers, like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, or take them on-premise. Google is an investor and plays a role in the product's development.
Caspio
Frank Zamani, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
This platform vendor focuses on enabling businesses to quickly build and deploy database applications without needing to hire skilled developers. The service is hosted on Amazon Web Services and uses Microsoft SQL Server on the back end, with a simple web interface and visual application development tools.
Docker
Ben Golub, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Docker sparked the container revolution that's transforming the industry, and the startup's first commercial product, Docker Datacenter, offers Containers-as-a-Service to enterprise clients. Datacenter serves as a platform for IT teams looking to manage the entire life cycle of on-premise applications, from development through production.
IBM
Ginni Rometty, CEO
Headquarters: Armonk, N.Y.
IBM's Bluemix implements open-source Cloud Foundry technology wrapped with other IBM tools and services. Bluemix is hosted on IBM's global network of SoftLayer data centers and supports multiple programming languages. The platform introduces serverless capabilities through the open-source OpenWhisk technology IBM developed.
Jelastic
Ruslan Synytsky, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Jelastic leverages container tech to offer a cloud development platform that's highly scalable and can be configured with a flexibility more commonly associated with cloud infrastructure. Jelastic's service, popular with developers of web applications, also delivers simplified management, integration with DevOps tools, and support for multiple programming languages.
Kony
Thomas Hogan, CEO
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Kony delivers to developers a set of services and tools that help them rapidly build and deploy mobile applications for the enterprise. Kony's platform supports the entire application life cycle and ensures apps are compatible across device types while enforcing data integrity and security measures.
LogMeIn
William Wagner, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Looking to carve out a strong position in the rapidly expanding Internet of Things market, remote access vendor LogMeIn offers the Xively platform. Developers can leverage Xively to build back-end solutions, replete with secure connectivity and data services, that manage the networks of mobile sensors and devices that are rapidly proliferating across the world.
Mendix
Derek Roos, CEO
Headquarters: Boston
Mendix enables businesses large and small to build custom web and mobile apps visually and avoid writing any code. The development platform includes a range of industry-specific tools and templates that can be accessed to simplify and accelerate app deployment.
Nexmo (Vonage)
Alan Masarek, Vonage CEO
Headquarters: Holmdel, N.J.
The San Francisco-based Communications Platform-as-a-Service provider was acquired by Vonage last year. Nexmo's platform provides APIs that ease the integration of chat, text and voice communications services, enabling enterprise developers to embed contextual communication features into business applications.
OutSystems
Paulo Rosado, CEO
Headquarters: Atlanta
OutSystems opts for a model-driven approach supporting visual development of applications and their integration with existing business software and custom code. The company, originally founded in Portugal, includes management and analytics tools for developing web and mobile applications in a low-code environment.
Pivotal
Rob Mee, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Pivotal, the EMC-VMware spin-off behind the extremely popular Cloud Foundry open-source development platform, introduced its first formal channel program last year. The company also forged a closer relationship with Microsoft, an investor in the company's latest funding round, as Pivotal's Cloud Foundry distribution hosted on Azure is an increasingly popular choice for enterprises.
QuickBase
Rick Willett, CEO
Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
The platform vendor broke off from financial software powerhouse Intuit in 2016. Now QuickBase is independently bringing to market its low-code cloud service that enables non-developers to create and deploy custom, scalable, and secure applications in the cloud that tackle specific business challenges.
Red Hat
James Whitehurst, CEO
Headquarters, Raleigh, N.C.
Red Hat's OpenShift got its start as a traditional Platform-as-a-Service, but has evolved substantially in recent years to support containers. The open-source service offers native support for Docker and Kubernetes, integrates with DevOps tools, and enables the deployment and management of applications built with those container technologies.
Salesforce (Heroku)
Marc Benioff, CEO
Headquarters: San Francisco
Heroku was a pioneering cloud-based development platform, and after its acquisition by CRM giant Salesforce became an even more popular choice with enterprise developers looking to rapidly deploy production applications. Heroku supports many programming languages and offers integrated data services as part of a comprehensive ecosystem.
ServiceNow
Frank Slootman, CEO
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
ServiceNow, a cloud pioneer that specializes in enterprise service management, offers its customers an application development studio stocked with pre-designed services and templates they can use to automate line-of-business and IT processes. The platform supports cloud-native applications that solve service management challenges through forms-based workflows.
Software AG (LongJump)
Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO
Headquarters: Darmstadt, Germany
LongJump, a platform owned by German software vendor Software AG, provides tools to nontechnical users looking to design and deploy their own applications. The service is popular with small and midsize companies that prefer to leverage models and templates for application development rather than needing to code.
VMware
Pat Gelsinger, CEO
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Looking to head off a disruption caused by container tech, VMware introduced Photon, a platform geared for developers who want to take advantage of the benefits of Docker and its ecosystem. Photon allows users to provision Kubernetes, a container orchestration technology open-sourced by Google, as a cloud-based service.
Weaveworks
Alexis Richardson, CEO
Headquarters: London
This startup, an emerging player in the Docker ecosystem, offers a comprehensive platform for supporting cloud-native projects. Weaveworks makes accessible to its customers several open-source technologies that can be used by DevOps teams to rapidly string together sophisticated container-based applications at enterprise scale.