As the cloud battle continues, HP Unveils Cloud Application Platform

The battle for the cloud continues to heat up with HP announcing earlier today the latest addition to its portfolio of cloud related products and services.  Called the HP Cloud Application PaaS, the offer fills a hole in its cloud portfolio in an area commonly referred to as Platform as a Service or PaaS.

In what has been a rather poorly kept secret, HP has spent much of the last 6 months looking for its PaaS partner for a new global OEM licensing agreement finally settling on Vancouver, British Columbia based ActiveState and its Stackato PaaS software. The HP Cloud Application PaaS will be a fundamental component of the HP Cloud, and will be generally available in the near future.

HP describes its enterprise focused PaaS as “an application platform for development, deployment, and management of cloud applications using any language on any stack. The HP Cloud Application PaaS enables the real-world enterprise to reap the benefits of cloud computing while preserving the order of managed IT.”

The PaaS market is quickly becoming a center point for the fast growing cloud sector. Global revenue for the platform as a service market are expected to grow consistently over the next five years from $1.2bn in 2012 to $2.9bn in 2016, up from $900m in 2011, according to research firm Gartner. But as the platform-as-a-service delivery model grows, it will intensify the competition between large cloud service providers and enterprise software suppliers, which look to capture the growing, market, Gartner predicted.

The company also said “by the end of 2013, all major software vendors will have competitive production offerings in the PaaS market. By 2016, competition among the PaaS vendors will produce new programming models, new standards and new software market leaders. However, until then, users will continue to experience architectural changes to technologies, business models and vendor alignments in the PaaS market.”

Who’s next? With this announcement HP’s Cloud grabs a potentially big technological advantage. Expect other cloud providers to do the same by quickly following HP’s lead of an integrated PaaS technology as key a differentiator. It’s also interesting to see that HP has selected ActiveState to form the core of its new PaaS offering. ActiveState’s Stackato is built atop VMware’s Cloudfoundry project, and is described as an application platform for creating your own private, secure, and flexible enterprise Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) using any language on any stack on any cloud.

ActiveState CEO, Bart Copeland said, “This partnership validates Stackato technology, as well as its enterprise-focused approach to PaaS. It also signifies the advent of the PaaS-integrated infrastructure service. It’s a competitive space. I expect other large infrastructure service providers to follow suit—They’ll move up the chain to offer PaaS solutions, all in an effort to differentiate their IaaS services for enterprise customers".

Toph Whitmore VP, Marketing at ActiveState agrees saying “In using ActiveState HP has a security advantage. One of Stackato’s enterprise benefits is its security model; with secure virtual containers “individually wrapping” cloud data and applications. The security model (which leverages Linux containerization) reduces risk in the enterprise, and—when used in a public cloud environment—eliminates a hack-once-compromise-all threat. Effectively, HP has established a private PaaS on a public cloud, and further differentiated its HP Cloud from competitors using a “single-playground-within-the-firewall” public PaaS. With those other guys, the multi-tenant architecture PaaS playground is only as secure as the weakest tenant, and vulnerable to metaphorical playground bullies.”

Copeland also believes that his company’s new relationship with HP will be a game changer for not only his firm, but also the entire PaaS space. “This OEM relationship puts Stackato at the forefront of PaaS technology. Market leadership is important, but so is driving the technology forward. It’s still early days for PaaS, but we’re going to continue to move fast. I look forward to seeing this technology evolve. And to seeing even more enterprise customers innovate with Stackato. Our customers push us to make the technology better. This is a big win for ActiveState, with more to come.”

Copeland’s final comment summarizes the opportunity for ActiveState perfectly. “They chose us.”