A PEEK INTO WHAT REAL USERS THINK IT Central Station Helps Tech

PaaS

A PEEK INTO WHAT REAL USERS THINK

2015

IT Central Station helps tech professionals by providing...

A comprehensive list of A sample of real user Specific information to help enterprise level PaaS reviews from tech you choose the best vendor vendors. professionals. for your needs.

Disclaimer

IT Central Station Ltd. does not endorse or recommend any products or services. The views and opinions of reviewers quoted in this document, IT Central Station websites, and IT Central Station materials (i.e. Content) do not reflect the opinions of IT Central Station. We make no guarantees about the accuracy, currency, suitability, or quality of the content, and we assume no responsibility for unintended, objectionable, inaccurate, misleading, or unlawful content made available by Content authors or other third parties.

User reviews, candid discussions, and more for enterprise technology professionals.

The Internet has completely changed the way we make buying decisions. We now use ratings and review sites to see what other real users think before we buy Use IT Central Station to: electronics, book a hotel, visit a doctor or choose a restaurant. But in the world of enterprise technology, • Read and post reviews of vendors most of the information online and in your inbox comes and products from vendors but what you really want is objective • Request or share information about information from other users. functionality, quality, and pricing • Contact real users with relevant We created IT Central Station to provide product experience technology professionals like you with a • Get immediate answers to questions community platform to share information about • Validate vendor claims enterprise software, applications, hardware and • Exchange tips for getting the best services. deals with vendors

We commit to offering user-contributed information that is valuable, objective and relevant. We protect your privacy by providing an environment where you can post anonymously and freely express your views. As a result, the community becomes a valuable resource, ensuring you get access to the right information and connect to the right people, whenever you need it.

244 5th Avenue, Suite R-230 New York, NY 10001 www.ITCentralStation.com [email protected] +1 (646) 328-1944

This report is comprised of a comprehensive list of enterprise level server virtualization software vendors. We have also included several real user reviews posted on ITCentralStation.com. The reviewers of these products have been validated as real users based on their LinkedIn profiles to ensure that they provide reliable opinions and not those of product vendors.

IMPORTANT NOTICE

Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give to Get”. Our active community and unbiased reviews are made possible by your participation and as such, we ask that you share your expertise with us as well. Please email [email protected] and one of our community managers will be in touch with you shortly. You can choose to review anonymously or not and your company name will not be included in the review.

If you found this report and/or the reviews on IT Central Station useful, we would greatly appreciate your participation in giving back to our community.

Rating: 8.12 Microsoft Azure (59 reviews) Rating: 8.9 Amazon Amazon AWS (54 reviews) Rating: 8.0 Heroku Heroku (36 reviews) Rating: 7.34 Google Google App Engine (19 reviews) Rating: 9.0 Rackspace Rackspace Cloud (25 reviews) Rating: 10.0 salesforce.com Salesforce1 Platform (13 reviews)

Engine Yard Engine Yard Cloud (6 reviews)

Pramati Technologies WaveMaker (5 reviews) Rating: 8.0 Jelastic Jelastic (2 reviews)

IBM SmartCloud Application Services (4 reviews)

eApps eApps (2 reviews)

Mendix Mendix (3 reviews)

OrangeScape OrangeScape PaaS Cloud (1 reviews)

TIBCO TIBCO Silver (3 reviews)

Acquia Acquia

CenturyLink AppFog

AT&T AT&T Platform as a Service

BitRefinery BitRefinery

Caspio Caspio (1 reviews)

Claris Networks Claris Cloud

Cordys Cordys PaaS

Google Google Compute Engine

IIJ GIO IIJ GIO PaaS Cloud

interCloud interCloud

Internap Network Services Internap Cloud

Konfigure Konfigure

Software AG LongJump PaaS Cloud

Oracle Oracle Cloud Platform

Peer 1 Peer 1

Software AG Process Live

Progress Rollbase

Corent Technology SurPaaS

Teklinks Teklinks

Tier 3 Tier 3 (2 reviews)

WorkXpress WorkXpress

According to the IT Central Station community, security is the most important criteria when selecting a Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud. PaaS clouds vary in the level of abstraction they provide their consumers. There are trades off between efficiency and control over the application. Other key considerations are: the degree to which it will integrate seamlessly with the rest of the enterprise platform, the speed and resilience of internetworking, and the extent to which the platform is under control for configuration purposes. Read more »

Over 76,438 professionals have used IT Central Station research on enterprise tech solutions. Here are the top PaaS vendors based on product reviews, ratings, and comparisons. All reviews and ratings are from real users, validated by our triple authentication process.

19533 Views8736 Comparisons26 Reviews 1589 FollowersAverage Rating: 9.0 1. Amazon AWS

14153 Views9405 Comparisons29 Reviews 1508 FollowersAverage Rating: 8.2 2. Azure

20441 Views9081 Comparisons15 Reviews 1641 FollowersAverage Rating: 8.0 3. Heroku

11552 Views4653 Comparisons11 Reviews 1335 FollowersAverage Rating: 7.4 4. Google App Engine

Chart Key Views: Number of total page views

Comparisons: Number of times compared to another product

Reviews: Total number of reviews on IT Central Station

Followers: Number of followers on IT Central Station

Average Rating: Average rating based on reviews

The total ranking of a product (i.e. bar length) is based on a weighted aggregate ranking of that product's Views (weighting factor = © 2015 IT Central 17.5%),Station Comparisons (17.5%), Reviews (17.5%), Followers (17.5%), and AverageReproduction Rating (30%). Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas TOP 5 TOP 5 Based on Views Based on Views of Comparisons

20441 Heroku 9405 Azure

19533 Amazon AWS 9081 Heroku

14153 Azure 8736 Amazon AWS

11987 Salesforce1 Platform 7152 Rackspace Cloud

11552 Google App Engine 4653 Google App Engine

TOP 5 TOP 5 Based on Followers Based on Rating

1764 Rackspace Cloud 10.0 Salesforce1 Platform

1641 Heroku 9.0 Amazon AWS

1589 Amazon AWS 9.0 Rackspace Cloud

1508 Azure 8.2 Azure

1335 Google App Engine 8.0 Heroku

Overview: Windows Azure is Microsoft's cloud platform where developers can create, deploy, and maintain their apps. This cloud application platform allows developers to concentrate on the actual applications, while it takes care of all the elements behind the apps.

Windows Azure offers open across multiple frameworks,languages, and tools. It is fully scalable, localized in that it is hosted globally in many datacenters, and has widespread capabilities are, catering for all elements of application development, deployment, and management.

Azure is comprised of several different service modules,including Infrastructure; Web; Mobile; Dev & Test; Big Data; Media;Storage, Backup & Recovery; and Identity & Access Management.

Sample BMW, Toyota, easyJet, NBC Sports, HarperCollins, Aviva, TalkTalk Business, Avanade, and Telenor. Customers: Pricing Pay As You Go - No upfront payment required. No commitment, can cancel at any time. Information: Windows Azure pricing based on usage.

6-Months pay monthly

- Save up to 27% as compared to Pay As You Go plan. There is also an additional discount if you prepay for the 6 month period.

Minimum payment of $500 per month.

12-Months pay monthly

- Savings of up to 29.5% as compared to Pay As You Go plan. There is also an additional discount if you prepay for the 12 month period.

Windows Azure pricing beginning at $500 per month.

Support Options

- Have access to support expertise with one of the flexible support plans.

Price is dependent on the support plan selected

Top Heroku vs. Azure Compared 31% of the time. Comparisons:* Rackspace Cloud vs. Azure Compared 15% of the time. Amazon AWS vs. Azure Compared 12% of the time.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas Top Industries:* Media Company 11% Financial Services Firm 10% Transportation Company 9% Tech Company 9%

Company Size:* 1-500 Employees 17% 500-5000 Employees 34% 5000+ Employees 50%

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas AZURE REVIEW BY A REAL USER Uriel Maimon Verified by IT Central Station WHAT REAL USERS Owner at a tech consulting company with 1-500 employees ARE SAYING... "Implementation is simple Valuable Features: but anything to do with referencing other The ability to kick start a new web application or website and having them up and packages is simply running in matter of minutes still amazes me. frustrating"

Improvements to My Organization: "Learning curve to get it up and running but it's Deploying new release for existing web applications has now become a matter of scalable and flexible." right clicking the name of the project and clicking ‘publish’, the same activity before might have been done in hours to days – depending on the complexity for the app. "The management console needs work but we would Room for Improvement: not be building the Healthcare IT application if Anything to do with referencing other packages is simply frustrating, this is mostly a it were not for Azure." problem with the Windows framework and not the hosting service, but it is still the most time consuming and irritating thing about using ASP.NET "Easy to connect to on- premise infrastructure, but Previous Solutions: deprovisioning services is complicated and SLA is Yes, well back in the days we used to install physical servers, then we went to not competitive" manually virtual servers, that to hosted virtual server, then to Amazon machines and now switched to Windows Azure. "We moved our accounting database from an in-house Initial Setup: SQL Server to MS Azure cloud and saw a significant As simple as can be. increase in performance."

Implementation Team: "Good for running Microsoft Enterprise We do all technical work in house and with Azure there was really no need for Applications, although a external assistance. pricey alternative to other IaaS/Paas service Setup Cost: providers in the market."

When starting out I became member of the BizSpark program so the initial cost was 0 (FREE!), on customer’s projects the cost can go from $50 to $200 per month which is really cost effective for them.

Alternate Solutions:

Yes for every project we will compare Azure with Amazon, with virtual servers with a physical server. But in almost every case choosing Azure will be a no brainer.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas AZURE REVIEW BY A REAL USER SrEngineer672 Verified by IT Central Station Consultant at a tech services company with 1-500 employees

Valuable Features:

Scalability, affordability and the flexibility of the product.

Improvements to My Organization:

You can off-site required services to help mitigate risk

You can take advantage of the scalability to have short term high intensive processes be used by their services

You can totally take away the need for any server hardware in your organisation

Room for Improvement:

Probably the 2 main areas where things could be improved are getting direct console access to VM's and its Azure backup solution to add backup types (eg System State).

Use of Solution:

3 months

Deployment Issues:

We went with the volume license of credits and still find it difficult to activate those credits as there is a particular website you have to go to.

Stability Issues:

There has been documented issues with stability, however we did not experience it.

Scalability Issues:

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Good, I can shoot email questions and get responses in a good amount of time.

I haven't had to raise a technical support for Azure though for Office 365 I have and I've found it excellent.

Previous Solutions:

We looked at AWS, a locally based cloud provider and a datacentre.

Initial Setup:

It was a learning curve to get it up and running. If I had prior training I would have found it straight forward but the time lines for implementation meant I had to "dive in".

Implementation Team:

In-house

ROI:

We are able to provide services to clients that allows us get a good ROI once we have deployed Azure to them.

Setup Cost:

Setup cost with Azure is minimal for what they are supplying. Everything takes less than 10 minutes to deploy.

Day to Day costs is what you use, we can now review those costs and look at the new features (Automation) to make those costs even more efficient.

Alternate Solutions:

We looked at AWS, a locally based cloud provider and a datacentre.

Other Advice:

Get onboard with Microsoft and the Azure team and listen out to their partner training. They did a big Azure for IT Pros via their channel 9 msdn a few weeks ago. There is plenty of webinars and e-books which will teach you what you want to know.

Overview: Amazon Web Services (AWS) covers all your business-centered needs from start to finish, and now they have added another layer of convenience to the experience the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is an innovative concept that lets businesses flexibly increase or decrease the amount of storage and processing with ease. The service includes all aspects of a business model including computing information, storing files and other database services, but the most convenient aspect of this option is that EC2 allows you to pay as you go. If you use less than the amount of cloud space you ordered,you will only be charged for the percentage you have used; if you go over, you'll simply be charged for the excess at a standard rate.

Sample Pinterest, General Electric, Pfizer, Netflix, and Nasdaq. Customers: Pricing General Purpose Current Generation - Information: Upfront Cost: $516 USD/$1032 USD

Hourly Cost: $0.428 USD per hour/$0.857 USD per hour

General Purpose Previous Generation -

Upfront Cost: $69-$552 USD (depending on size)

Hourly Cost: $0.059-$0.47 USD per hour

GPU Instances Current Generation -

Upfront Cost: $925 USD

Hourly Cost: $0.599 per hour

Top Azure vs. Amazon AWS Compared 13% of the time. Comparisons:* Rackspace Cloud vs. Amazon AWS Compared 7% of the time. Heroku vs. Amazon AWS Compared 4% of the time.

Top Industries:* Media Company 20% Transportation Company 14% Financial Services Firm 9% Comms Service Provider 8%

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas Company Size:* 1-500 Employees 25% 500-5000 Employees 34% 5000+ Employees 41%

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas AMAZON AWS REVIEW BY A REAL USER George Khairallah Verified by IT Central Station WHAT REAL USERS Chief Technology Officer at a tech services company with ARE SAYING... 1-500 employees "An amazing platform to build on but IAM policies, Valuable Features: and cross account access needs improvement." The whole IaaS model is an invaluable service. The ease of deployment, maintenance, and scalability, and pay as you go model make AWS an amazing platform to build on. "The product is simple and can be learned with online documentation." Improvements to My Organization: "The technical support was AWS sitting at the core of our service, and we have been able to provide an a 7 on a scale of 1-10, but amazing number of features, that were otherwise very expensive, and labor intensive to put in place, these include high availability, business continuity dynamic usage and planning, disaster recovery, among others. flexibility."

Room for Improvement: "Great platform to spin up servers in minutes; provides multiple tools for AWS has an amazing feature set but I have not used all of them to be able to have administrators; UI can be a well rounded opinion about improvement. However, of the features I have used, I would say IAM policies, and cross account access would probably be one of the puzzling sometimes" main areas of improvement. Amazon is working on a " "We have been able to Service Catalog leverage the agility of Amazon to work faster. " which could potentially fill some of these holes. AWS's customer service is ridiculously good." Use of Solution: "Great for experimenting with different setups and I've used it for three years. rolling out solutions effectively but monitoring Deployment Issues: could be better"

Surprisingly, since starting to use AWS, the process has been quite simple. The deployment was very smooth. Despite this, it does take a bit of getting used to when working with VPCs, and networking in an AWS context, but that's a fairly quick learning curve that can be attained easily.

Stability Issues:

Like anything, failures happen every once in a while. I have experienced some failed hardware under my instances, which caused a brief outage. The stability of the service, however, is also much more reliant on the architecture of the application than the stability of the AWS infrastructure. In any case, AWS has been quite stable over all.

Scalability is one of AWS' strengths. Scaling resources, be it an AWS EC2 instance, or an RDS instance is a snap. Also, scaling into multiple geographic regions in the world is also possible, and quite a realistic view in that environment.

Customer Service:

My experience with AWS customer service has been stellar. Everyone I come into contact with from Sales, to Technical Support are always friendly, and courteous.

Technical Support:

The technical support team is quite knowledgeable, and there is no question asked that doesn't get addressed with full attention, complete with references, examples, and a recap of conversations that were conducted.

Their technical support processes are clearly well thought out. I can always know what communication to expect, and the level of help that I can expect to receive. I have yet to call them on an issue where a resolution wasn't reached on the first or second contact.

Previous Solutions:

Previously, I used co-location services. The reason I switched is quite obvious:

Cost

Constant overheads

Constant challenge of meeting budgets with consistent cutting edge technology

AWS has removed all these variables, and allowed me to concentrate on growing my services without having to worry about aging servers, or under capacity hardware, etc.

Initial Setup:

Understanding AWS is actually quite easy. There are some notions that require a bit of previous knowledge to grasp. The good news is that the documentation available about the different services is quite extensive, which can give anyone a head start in launching their AWS services. The complexity of using AWS is directly related to the robustness of the application/service that is being deployed. The more AWS services are integrated together, the more complex the deployment will become.

Implementation Team:

All AWS services were deployed in-house, with assistance from AWS support teams.

Because there is no initial investment in AWS services (it's a pay as you go service in its basic form) the ROI is immediate. Because AWS costs are consistently being reduced, it is a great way to build services, offered at affordable prices, while still getting good returns on investment.

Setup Cost:

As mentioned above, AWS does not really have initial setup costs. It's like a utility company; you use the service, and pay for your usage. The daily cost is dependent upon the service being deployed at that point in time. For the flexibility, and consistent cutting edge technology that AWS operates on, it's well worth the price.

Alternate Solutions:

I have evaluated Azure, and Google as IaaS. Quite honestly, Google was too convoluted for my purposes, and although Azure had some nice "Microsoft-y" features that AWS doesn't necessarily have, I still felt that it was much easier to get started with AWS, than it is with the other services.

Other Advice:

Don't be afraid of "The Cloud". As prominent as it is today, a lot of people, and small businesses, are still afraid of storing their data away from their physical office. There are a ton of advantages in using AWS for your infrastructure instead of on- premises equipment. Give it a serious look before dismissing it. There is a lot that can be added here, but that could be an article all on its own.

Valuable Features:

EC2, EBS, Security, and RDS services are all good.

Improvements to My Organization:

Currently I'm using the product for learning purposes.

Use of Solution:

I have used if for over a year.

Deployment Issues:

No issues encountered.

Stability Issues:

No issues encountered.

Scalability Issues:

Not yet.

Customer Service:

Very nice.

Technical Support:

Very good.

Previous Solutions:

Yes I used Microsoft Azure but it only provides a free trial for one month. This duration is not sufficient to learn cloud services. Hence I switched to AWS as Amazon provides AWS cloud as a free trial for one year. That is an ample amount of time to grasp the cloud concepts and gain hands-on experience.

The product is simple and can be learned with online documentation.

ROI:

Very convenient.

Overview: Established in 2007, Heroku is a cloud application platform providing a streamlined, efficient place for web app developers to create and deploy their applications. Heroku is designed to maximize developer productivity. With the entire web application development process available on the Herokucloud, creating and rolling out web apps has been made more efficient, convenient, and cost-effective than ever before.

Sample Facebook, UrbanDictionary, Code for America, Mailchimp, Rapportive, GitHub, TED, and Lyft. Customers: Pricing 1x (512MB RAM, 1x CPU Share) - $0.05/dyno-hour Information: 2x (1024MB RAM, 2x CPU Share) - $0.10/dyno-hour

Top Azure vs. Heroku Compared 32% of the time. Comparisons:* Google App Engine vs. Heroku Compared 16% of the time. Rackspace Cloud vs. Heroku Compared 10% of the time.

Top Industries:* Financial Services Firm 13% Marketing Services Firm 7% Comms Service Provider 7% Non Profit 6%

Company Size:* 1-500 Employees 41% 500-5000 Employees 16% 5000+ Employees 43%

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas HEROKU REVIEW BY A REAL USER Renan LE CARO Verified by IT Central Station WHAT REAL USERS Developer at a tech services company with 5000+ ARE SAYING... employees "Good host for nodejs, but Valuable Features: not the cheapest solution" "Amazing platform, poor Deploying with git, npm install git hook ... basically, they got it right for nodejs servers hosting. Free trials is limited (1 app running at a time) but good enough for customer service" a proof of concept. Using an Heroku backend and a GithHub pages front end serving static content, I can scale my app for free to a reasonable level. "Easy and fast, but slow restart and pricey." Room for Improvement:

Plugins aren't cheap (Mailchimp is $1.5/1000 emails).

Use of Solution:

6 months

Technical Support:

The doc is good, for nodejs at least. It is newbies friendly.

Previous Solutions:

I rejected Google app engine for there lack of nodejs support, and AWS for the complexity of setting up a simple app.

Initial Setup:

The CLI tools are good and deployment is quick. The web control panel ain't that great, I got into trouble trying to launch my app.

Setup Cost:

0 for now :)

Valuable Features:

Lots of integrations

Use of Solution:

1 year

Stability Issues:

I had an issue recently where my site was down intermittently for unknown reasons. I posted a ticket and 5 days have gone by without any resolution. I'm surprised at this total lack of customer service.

Customer Service:

So far very very poor. I'm considering switching to another platform for only this reason. How can a startup scale a business with such poor support. 5+ days no response to a valid ticket!

Technical Support:

Horrible because they take forever to respond. Days with no response.

Initial Setup:

The setup was pretty good.

Overview: Google App Engine is a Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) provider that equips web application developers with all the resources and tools that they need to develop, test, and run their applications on Google's infrastructure. Everything is built into the kit, so with one download of the SDK, you'll be well on your way to first-rate apps.

Sample Khan Academy, Best Buy, Gigya, MetOffice, Getaround, Mimiboard, NewsLimited, WebFilings, and Customers: CloudLock.

Pricing The Google App Engine pricing and product model is all about scalability. Users start out with 1GB of free Information: data storage and traffic, but this can be increased by activating paid applications. Once you do this, you'll be able to exceed these free quotas and will pay for the additional usage. You'll set a daily limit for the extra resources used so that you do not exceed your budget. Additional resources are billed at a fixed unit rate. Instance hours are an exception as they can also be purchased on a retainer basis, whereby you buy a set number of instance hours per week at a discount. There is also a Premier option, which unlocks all tools and resources and this option starts at $150 per account per month.

Top Heroku vs. Google App Engine Compared 31% of the time. Comparisons:* Rackspace Cloud vs. Google App Engine Compared 8% of the time. Azure vs. Google App Engine Compared 6% of the time.

Top Industries:* Financial Services Firm 19% Media Company 11% Transportation Company 10% Pharma/Biotech Company 7%

Company Size:* 1-500 Employees 22% 500-5000 Employees 33% 5000+ Employees 45%

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas GOOGLE APP ENGINE REVIEW BY A REAL USER Rajeev@4circles Verified by IT Central Station WHAT REAL USERS VP of Development at a tech consulting company with 1- ARE SAYING... 500 employees "Easy to upload from IDE. Valuable Features: ..." "Overall a good and cheap Easy to upload from IDE. platform with scalability support. Good for Room for Improvement: individuals and startups, but not suitable for Need a better documentation and tech support. heavy/large applications."

"A good application hosting option for short term, low budget startups"

Valuable Features:

- A very good platform for those applications that store something and retrieve it back.

- Google takes care of deploying the code to the clusters, monitoring, failover, and launching application instances as and when necessary. This takes a lot of the administrative work off the user.

- Easy and cheaper (in the short term)

- Unlimited scalabity to your application, and scales with demand.

- GAE supports MySQL db as well.

- App Engine doesn't provide you with the flexibility to use an equivalent service if you need to pick something else for your app.

Room for Improvement:

- Developers have read-only access to the filesystem on the Google App Engine.

- GAE is not suitable for CPU intensive calculations.

- You cannot produce a social graph using Google app engine.

- Once you think of migrating out of the AppEngine world, you'll face a lot of problems. For example, having to change your code to use your own datastore, task queues, and other services. If your application is fairly large, this will be a very difficult process.

- Since the backend is completely manage by Google, you don't have control over the environment your application runs in.

- Apart from the free space and to build some "Hobby" websites, Google App Engine is not the place java guys should look in as Java is quite heavy on memory front.

Other Advice:

Overall a good platform for running small applications that basically deals with storing and retrieving data from backend. Since the backend is handled by Google, you get a scalable app platform, but at the cost of losing control over the backend environment. You cannot tweak the backend and you just have to leave with whatever Google has to offer.

Overview: Rackspace is a listed company that specializes in hybrid cloud environments to support your applications and sites. The environments are based on its open-source operating system OpenStack.Rackspace Cloud caters for the private cloud, public cloud, dedicated servers, or a hybrid of platforms.

Your Rackspace Cloud environment is customizable according to your cloud requirements, and all products work together seamlessly from one portal.

Sample 3D Capacity, Acquity Group, Axios Systems, Behance, Blastro, Dominos Pizza, and Sage. Customers: Pricing Rackspace Cloud Servers - Rackspace Cloud pricing is on a per minute basis. Managed Cloud Service Information: Level is available for $100 per month and with a higher per minute rate. Starts at $29.20 per month.

Rackspace Cloud Block Storage - Standard Volumes: $0.12/GB/month (minimum $12/month for 100GB). SSD Volumes: $0.50/GB/month (minimum $50/month for 100GB).

Rackspace Cloud Files - Pay-as-you-grow, tiered pricing according to total TB required. Starts at 10c/GB/month.

Rackspace Cloud Backup - Infrastructure service level _ base price is $10/month/server + $0.10/GB/month + bandwidth starting at $0.12/GB. Managed Cloud Service Level _ standard pricing plus $100 monthly fee.

Rackspace Cloud Databases - Billed per hour based on instance size. Starts at $36.50/month. Infrastructure Service Level or Managed Cloud Service Level options available.

Rackspace Cloud Big Data Platform -

1.3TB Storage _ $0.37/hour ($270.10/month minimum). 11.0TB Storage _ $2.96/hour ($2,160.80/month minimum).

Rackspace Cloud Load Balancers - Per Instance _ $10.95/month ($0.015/hour, billed per minute). OR Per Instance with SSL _$36.50/month ($0.05/hour, billed per minute). + 100 Concurrent Connections _ $10.95/month ($0.015/hour, billed per minute).

Rackspace Cloud DNS - Free

Rackspace Cloud Networks - Free

Rackspace Cloud Queues -

1 million free API requests/month. Then pay $0.01 per 10,000 API requests.

Rackspace Cloud Monitoring -

Five monitoring zones and pricing is based on the zone. Starts at $1.50/month.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas Top Azure vs. Rackspace Cloud Compared 19% of the time. Comparisons:* Heroku vs. Rackspace Cloud Compared 12% of the time. Amazon AWS vs. Rackspace Cloud Compared 9% of the time.

Top Industries:* Financial Services Firm 14% Marketing Services Firm 13% Comms Service Provider 11% Media Company 7%

Company Size:* 1-500 Employees 20% 500-5000 Employees 27% 5000+ Employees 53%

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas RACKSPACE CLOUD REVIEW BY A REAL USER patent_tech Verified by IT Central Station WHAT REAL USERS VP of Product at a legal firm with 1-500 employees ARE SAYING... "Reliable Service, lots of Valuable Features: change"

Ability to quickly create reliable virtual servers. We've moved everything from gen 1 servers to new performance images. The performance flash drive based servers "The new generation of are very fast and have nice options for adding disk space. Cloud files have proven Rackspace Cloud servers to be fast and reliable for us. strong improvement over the first generation." Room for Improvement:

I wouldn't recommend adopting the first version of any of their new products. But once the bugs are worked out the services are robust and reliable.

It would be a bonus if they could automatically move around virtual machines in a clustered environment. We've had several problems where another host on a shared machine is getting a denial of service or overloading the server and that impacts our instance. In that case they have no way of moving you to a different base server, you either have to create a replacement server or wait for the problem to be resolved.

Use of Solution:

Five years

Stability Issues:

Solution has generally been quite stable with only a few issues over the years.

Scalability Issues:

The cloud load balancer product was a much needed system. Prior to that we had to create our own load balancer on a virtual server. Initially the cloud load balancer was not very stable but they've worked through the issues and it's much better. Now it's pretty easy to add in additional servers behind the load balancer if you need scalability.

Customer Service:

All of the marketing is about fanatical service but in practice it's very hard to live up to those expectations. Most rackers are friendly and try to be very helpful.

It's often difficult to get timely support with a ticket, they seem to live by phone calls there. Many times you'll get a tech who runs through a checklist and sometimes can solve your problem. You can usually get escalation if the issue is severe or really needs help. I've found the service monitors you can set up through the control panel are often ignored by tech support as just noise. If you need support, you generally need to call them.

Other Advice:

We're using their managed operations - sysops currently and have used the managed service for several years. This is a good way to reduce the need for in- house system admin skills and time but in practice this hasn't eliminated the need to have our own staff monitor this area. I like the idea of Rackspace managing the sysops side of the app but they probably need a better way to transfer knowledge to their team. It's very generic support by default.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas RACKSPACE CLOUD REVIEW BY A REAL USER reviewer6207 Verified by IT Central Station Director of eCommerce at a retailer with 1-500 employees

Valuable Features:

The new generation of Rackspace Cloud servers are a strong improvement over the first generation. Performance is improved significantly, and the new dashboard gives managers more information.

Room for Improvement:

I feel that the managed services Rackspace is known for have fallen off a bit. I had a few instances where techs on off hours made extremely bad decisions, resulting in extended site outages lasting hours. Make sure techs are fully trained.

Top Azure vs. Salesforce1 Platform Compared 20% of the time. Comparisons:* Rackspace Cloud vs. Salesforce1 Platform Compared 14% of the time. Amazon AWS vs. Salesforce1 Platform Compared 13% of the time.

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas SALESFORCE1 PLATFORM REVIEW BY A REAL USER Eric Dirst Verified by IT Central Station WHAT REAL USERS President, Online Services at a university with 5000+ ARE SAYING... employees "Fits Agile development model and easy to use, but Valuable Features: has its issues."

Fast speed to delivery of new solutions; fits Agile development model; easy integration and mashup with other SaaS/PaaS offerings; combination of configuration and coding; easy to learn and get up-to-speed quickly for developers; no waiting for hardware & other environments to be ready; scales up immediately

Improvements to My Organization:

We went from 1 or 2 CRM enhancement releases per year to a minimum of 8 per year by moving from on premise CRM to cloud CRM. Automation of process steps have saved us millions of dollars by removing manual steps/activities. We have reduced our average speed to respond to customers by >4000% through automated routing/workflow. Most importantly, our users actually love the system (how many times have you heard that?).

Room for Improvement:

Hard to negotiate ability to scale down; integrations with back-office systems is still complex unless you have robust SOA platform already in place at your organization; doesn't fit for heavy graphics or multimedia apps; could benefit from other than per-user pricing; reporting tools are not great and you usually have to use a 3rd party reporting tool for any complex report or reports which also need to source data from outside your CRM (which many of ours do), and to get any historical data analysis (e.g. need data warehouse).

Use of Solution:

Since 2009

Deployment Issues:

We did with reporting. We did not sufficiently test our reporting tools, built with a combination of salesforce and cognos reporting, and there were too many discrepancies in the numbers being reported such that we had to immediately put a tiger team together to address. This had nothing to do with the platform, and more to do with our process for adequately testing large scale reporting before rolling out to 4,000 people.

Stability Issues:

Nope, it's been more stable than any on premise software we've ever had.

Very good. As usual, if you run into anything serious, escalate quickly. They have channels for escalating, so use them. Don't let your technical teams try to solve themselves for too long.

Previous Solutions:

We previously used Oracle CRM on premise. We switched because we spent too much time applying patches and upgrades and regression testing such that we were unable to respond to changing business conditions and put in enhancements. Now we never deal with patches and upgrades and we only focus on enhancements.

Initial Setup:

Much of it was straightforward, with the only complex areas being areas that we wanted to customize for items like inquiry routing (our rules were very complex) and analyzing how we wanted to configure the data best to allow us to also report they way we wanted to for operations, executive and historical comparison reporting. Thinking those concepts through was difficult and I'd suggest spending more time on those activities than anything else during design, and test your design concepts early so you can adjust if it turns out your assumptions don't work out the way you thought they would when you see real data being put through the system.

Implementation Team:

We used Appirio as our implementation vendor. They did a solid job. As usual, with consulting, it's the strength of the team they field for you, so that is what you should evaluate the most.

ROI:

We have a case study on our implementation on salesforce.com website that you can read, under DeVry.

Alternate Solutions:

Yes, we also looked at RightNow Technologies, which was later bought by Oracle.

Overview: Jelastic is the first company that combined unlimited PaaS ease of use (developer’s productivity) and the container-based IaaS flexibility (agility) within a single platform. Jelastic supports popular programming languages such as Java, PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python and .NET and provides the maximum application density, the fastest deployment model and the easiest management for private, public and hybrid clouds, all while retaining the flexibility to customize infrastructure and application configurations. A wide choice of software stacks by default, Docker and Cartridges templates, plugins such as Ant Task, Eclipse, IDEA, Maven and NetBeans IDE and other technologies integrated inside make Jelastic a turnkey cloud with a complex solution. For more information or to start a free, two-week trial, visit us at www.jelastic.com

Sample Hosting Providers: Locaweb, Planeetta, dogado, Elastx Layershift, ServInt, Hostnet, Info.nl, Innofield, Customers: Lunacloud, Reg.ru, Websolute

Private Cloud and Integrators: Datajoe, Croc, Ciklum, Vergence, Centerprise, GMV Soluciones

Pricing The price for Jelastic VPC is charged per server and already includes 24/7 technical support. A private Information: customer can choose between two schemes:

- highly available cluster (5 servers and more)

- standard configuration cluster (3 servers)

Hosting providers can implement Jelastic Public Cloud via a no-risk revenue-sharing model.

New partners will be charged one-time fee for the initial deployment which also includes training, knowledge sharing and free beta support for up to 1 month. Important differentiation between Jelastic partnership model and other providers is the fact that Jelastic provides 7/24/365 technical support to all partners for the duration of the agreement without any additional fee.

For developers the pricing for using Jelastic resources depends on hosting providers. Jelastic provides a flexible pricing system where you pay only for the resources used with no need to reserve more than your app requires.

Top Heroku vs. Jelastic Compared 20% of the time. Comparisons:* Azure vs. Jelastic Compared 12% of the time. Amazon AWS vs. Jelastic Compared 10% of the time.

* Data is based on the aggregate profiles of IT Central Station Users researching this solution.

© 2015 IT Central Station Reproduction Prohibited To read more reviews about PaaS, please visit: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas JELASTIC REVIEW BY A REAL USER Ismet Ozalp Verified by IT Central Station WHAT REAL USERS Co-founder at a tech services company with 1-500 ARE SAYING... employees "Costs less than other solutions and it's easy to Valuable Features: migrate."

Automatic vertical and horizontal scaling. "We like the support for vertical and horizontal Easy setup process, I created my production and test environments in minutes. auto-scaling."

Easy deployment throughout maven (automatically deploys your applications to all web servers if you have high availability).

Pay only for the resources your application uses.

Improvements to My Organization:

We almost don't have to maintain our servers. We don't have to worry about scaling as our user-base grows. Saves time and money.

Room for Improvement:

An S3 like storage system, if they have a s3 API compatible system I can move my files from AWS.

Use of Solution:

2 years

Technical Support:

I am satisfied with technical support but Jelastic is a platform there are several service providers, so I can not comment on all of them.

Previous Solutions:

I used AWS. The problem with AWS was, I need to make a commitment for 3 years in order to reduce the price of a ec2 instance. But a lot changes in 3 years, at the end of the second year you may want to change your instance type, like I did want to move from medium utilized server to a high utilized one but I already had contract on medium. With Jelastic I did not make any commitments and it's still costs less.

It took almost 5 minutes. A few clicks from the Jelastic control panel and you are ready to go.

Alternate Solutions:

Heroku

Valuable Features:

- No Vendor-Lock-In

- Usage-based Billing

- Easy-to-use Management Dashboard

Use of Solution:

2 Years

Technical Support:

Based on our experience, the technical support from Jelastic is 10 of 10!

Other Advice:

Jelastic is exactly what we expect from a PaaS vendor: easy-to-start, easy-to- manage, container based technology, support for vertical and horizontal auto- scaling, and all this without vendor lock-in.

This report features just a few of the PaaS reviews on IT Central Station. If you would like to read more about what real users are saying about the many PaaS solutions on the market, visit the PaaS page at IT Central Station: http://www.itcentralstation.com/category/paas

There are a number of ways you can participate in the IT Central Station community. Write a review, read a comment, or just follow a product. Either way, we’ll be sure to let you know when people are talking about the solutions you care about!

Give to Get

Did you find this whitepaper helpful? At IT Central Station, our philosophy is “Give to Get”. Our active community and unbiased reviews are made possible by your participation and as such, we ask that you share your expertise with us as well. Please expect to be contacted shortly by an IT Central Station Community Manager. We will ask you for 10 minutes of your time to review a product that you use either via a 10 minute phone interview or questionnaire. You can choose to review anonymously or not and your company name will not be included in the review.

If you found this report and/or the reviews on IT Central Station useful, we would greatly appreciate your participation in giving back to our community.