Platform as a Service

mag 15

Software AG wants to make app development easy for business users with Live software

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Software AG, the German software company, wants to make it easy for people who can’t write code to plan, build and run their own business applications, just as people with programming chops can build on top of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings such as Engine Yard and Heroku. Toward that end, it’s unveiled a new line of products, Software AG Live.

The software line includes a trio of components that function on their own but can work well together: a tool for collaborating and laying out the functions, processes, inputs and outputs of an application; a system for assembling and tweaking pieces of the application itself; and a vehicle for integrating data from existing applications. The applications that come out of Software AG Live can also run on mobile devices, which falls in with the trend of using PaaSes to build mobile apps.

AgileApps Live is the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) component of the new Software AG Live product line.

With this PaaS, “subject-matter experts are now empowered to build their own solutions and apps,” said Ivo Totev (pictured), head of Software AG’s cloud business unit and a member of the company’s executive board.

The platform is available now, and the other pieces are on the way. They will all be able to run on the Software AG cloud hosted on Rackspace, a spokesman said, but can be deployed on other clouds or on premises.

Last month SoftwareAG said that it had acquired LongJump, which previously provided part of the new software bundle. Now, a few weeks later, Software AG is turning around and announcing the full line under a new name.

“This really opens up some new potential audiences to Software AG,” said John Rymer, a Forrester Research VP and principal analyst focusing on application development. “If they can get the integration right, they can actually offer a pretty broad spectrum of development experiences and runtimes compared to the competition.” Competitors in the area of visual and cloud-based platforms for application development include Mendix, Rymer said.

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Tagged with: longjump • Platform as a Service • Software AG

mag 14

Wal-Mart gets PaaS and social software chops through OneOps, Tasty Labs buys

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It’s clear that Wal-Mart Stores wants to stay on top as a major online retailer in the United States and abroad, as it takes steps to turn stores into fulfillment centers and bolster its virtual capabilities. What hasn’t been clear is how that transition will look, or how long it will take.

@WalmartLabs gave people a glimpse at its playbook on Tuesday by disclosing in a blog post the acquisition of OneOps, a finalist in the LaunchPad competition at GigaOM’s 2012 Structure conference, as well as Tasty Labs, whose CEO, Joshua Schachter, founded Delicious.

Terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

According to the @WalmartLabs blog post, OneOps has “developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that enables us to significantly accelerate our PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) strategies.” The OneOps acquisition could strengthen Wal-Mart’s chances of rapidly building, tinkering with, testing and deploying new applications onto walmart.com and other online retail sites affiliated with the company, such as samsclub.com. The unification of the back-end components of many sites is an ongoing project for Wal-Mart.

As for the Tasty Labs buy, it could lead to additional social experiences for site visitors. Wal-Mart has been incorporating social elements into its sites, such as pins from Pinterest as well as recently reviewed and fast-moving items. But with Tasty Labs’ Jig product, customers have been able to type in their needs and get responses about products that could help meet said needs.

However Wal-Mart ends up making use of OneOps and Tasty Labs, the company could well keep acquiring companies as it strives to enhance its hardware and software arsenal. Wal-Mart might find a new acquisition target at this year’s Structure conference, coming up on June 19-20 in San Francisco, where another batch of companies will compete in the LaunchPad event, including Factor.io, Mertica and SaltStack.

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Tagged with: OneOps • Platform as a Service • Tasty Labs • Wal-Mart Stores

apr 30

Heroku says PostGIS support enables smarter mobile app development

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In case you hadn’t noticed, mobile app development is where the action is. It’s why Facebook just bought Parse, and why Amazon, Rackspace and Salesforce.com are frantically bolstering their mobile app building capabilities. And it’s why Heroku, which is owned by Salesforce.com, is now adding PostGIS 2.0 support to its development platform.

PostGIS is an extension to the PostgreSQL database that many developers use on Heroku’s platform as a service. According to a blog post announcing PostGIS 2.0 support in beta form, Heroku’s Craig Kerstiens wrote:

“PostGIS 2.0 will enable a new class of Heroku applications that leverage location data. Whether you are looking to compute walkability scores to nearby schools, target ads based on GPS locations, or search for apartments by specific neighborhoods PostGIS can help make you build richer functionality into your application more easily.”

Heroku’s sales pitch is that using PostGIS with Postgres gives developers more resources while cutting the number of services they might require.

For example, a developer who might have in the past turned to a proprietary tool like ESRI’s ArcGIS, and then manage that along with the rest of the stack can now stay with an open-source option tightly linked to the database of choice. That means reduced complexity and the ability to build richer location-based functions faster. At its most basic level, PostGIS support means you can perform spatial queries and analysis on your data.

And that could mean more useful apps. Instead of an app that shows you on a map where the nearest Peet’s Coffee is, you could get the best walking route to that location factoring in terrain and real world traffic or other data, according to Kerstiens.

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Tagged with: Craig Kerstiens • Heroku • MBaaS • Platform as a Service • PostGIS • postgres • PostgreSQL • Uncategorized

apr 29

AppFog drops Rackspace support

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AppFog, the Platform as a Service that pledged to run your applications on (almost) any cloud, is now one cloud down. As of May 2, the company is “turning off” the Rackspace infrastructure option. An email message announcing the change of plans sent April 27 told customers they could no longer create new applications on Rackspace as of that date.

While helping users host applications on five public clouds was one of Appfog’s main selling points, “it’s also become increasingly resource-intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. He referred users to the AppFog Console, which will enable them to clone their application onto new target infrastructure.

Carlson could not be reached for comment Monday morning, but, Generally speaking, PaaS adoption by business users has been sketchy at best. Many developers love PaaS because it makes development and testing very easy, but once the applications are built, many companies prefer to run them in-house (i.e., not on a public cloud). And, more specifically, there have been rumors that AppFog was seeking investment or even a potential buyout.

AppFog tried to end-run that argument by allowing deployment on private clouds as well, but it’s unclear how well that effort has gone. There has also been angst among companies, including AppFog, that built their PaaS offerings atop the Cloud Foundry framework. That was true when Cloud Foundry resided under VMware, and remains true since it was spun off to Pivotal, which is now selling its own Cloud Foundry PaaS that competes with third-party options.

~~I’ve reached out to Carlson for comment and will update this story when he responds.~~

Update: Carlson would not comment on rationale for dropping Rackspace but did say that AppFog has hundreds of paying customers and that his goal is to “build a big company in a big space.” AppFog still supports Amazon Web Services in three regions — North America, Europe and Asia as well as HP’s cloud.

This story was updated at 7:25 a.m. PST with Carlson’s comment.