2015

Cloud Platform Solutions Buyers Guide

Includes a Category Overview; the Top 10 Questions to Ask; Plus a Reference Directory of the Leading 28 Providers for Enterprise Platforms-as-a-Service Solutions

INTRODUCTION: The teenage years of this millennium will be known as the era when the enterprise finally grew up, technologically. And like a growing teenager, businesses today are both fascinated and frightened by the dramatic changes happening to all of their bits (and bytes). The enterprise is in the midst of a rapid and unnerving growth in mobility and data. The old, insular model for developing “in house” solutions is giving way to a more open and experimental distributed approach. For the past decade “” has been gaining traction with businesses primarily through the -as-a-Service (SaaS) application model. From the widespread adoption of mission critical systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), systems delivered through a cloud-based application, the enterprise and many of its younger technical employees have become comfortable with cloud services. Now the opportunity is present for an even larger leap to the cloud. In addition to SaaS, three other cloud models have emerged for consideration: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) – which provides access to hardware, network and physical resources; Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) – which focuses mostly on mobile application back ends; and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) – which provides a more comprehensive stack of solutions including , operating systems, development tools and . Let’s get it out of the way, Cloud Platform is an oxymoron – literally and figuratively. The literal is obvious, but the figurative is more subtle. The “Let’s get it out of heavily promoted benefits of cloud computing – agility, elasticity and the way, Cloud cost savings are often at odds with common concerns of a “platform- as-a-service” (PaaS) – security, stability, performance and switching Platform is an costs or vendor “lock-in”. oxymoron. The Whether you are a publicly traded corporation, a government institution literal is obvious, or even a small to medium-sized business, the benefits of a cloud but the figuratively platform are absolutely worth investigating today. In this Buyers Guide there is a solution for everyone, from small groups to multi-national is more subtle.” organizations. Solutions Review is not in the business of picking winners and losers in a technology solution sector; we will leave that to others. Our job is to help you get started evaluating providers. In this Buyers Guide, we have selected 29 cloud computing solutions as a way to narrow things down a bit. In order to help you start the process of sorting all this out, below are 10 questions, five for yourself, and five for a prospective solutions provider to your cloud computing needs. It will help you walk through what you want in a solution, what it’s supposed to do for you, as well as the solution offerings, services and staying power. And if you would like any more help from us, please send along an email or give us a call.

Douglas Atkinson President Solutions Review [email protected] (339) 927-9229

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5 Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Selecting a Cloud Platform Solution

QUESTION #1 What are my security needs? With the number and scale of security threats these days, security has to be at the top of the list for decision-makers. So how critical is the data you’ll be pumping through that cloud infrastructure and platform? Additionally, how is the potential new cloud platform planned to connect with other aspects of your business and technology environment, potentially creating new gateways for malicious attacks? Is the potential platform’s architecture such that security can be built into the solution? These answers can help you determine how much you will need to invest into security to ensure your new cloud platform dream doesn’t become a nightmare.

QUESTION #2 Where is the value-add in my business, both now and in the future? Businesses should maintain internal capability in areas where they have the most value-add. This way you can maintain in-house expertise needed to maintain your competitive edge in key product areas today, and in the future through innovation. On the other hand, areas where you don’t have much value- add and that aren’t necessary for maintaining your competitive edge, can be outsourced. Because the acquisition of a cloud platform might represent the outsourcing of internal business capability, make sure what you’re outsourcing won’t hurt you down the road through lost internal expertise.

QUESTION #3 What are the business needs I’m looking to address? Cloud platform solutions could represent significant savings for your company, but you still need to make sure you don’t pursue a solution your company doesn’t need. Make sure you actually need an entire enterprise cloud platform solution and not just a software add-on and vice versa. This requires that you clearly define the specific business needs driving the project.

QUESTION #4 How big is my company and IT department? Some cloud platform solutions providers will be better suited to helping smaller companies, while others cater toward larger companies. Pick potential solutions providers with a good reputation for working with other companies in your size, vertical, geography, etc. Additionally, the size, sophistication and slack within your IT department also impacts how good a match a potential solution is. Investigate what resources and capabilities your IT has available that might be relevant to implementing and running the cloud platform solution before you select a vendor.

QUESTION #5 What support will I need from the vendor? Even (or perhaps especially) large companies sometimes need extra support and services from vendors in order to make sure the enterprise technology solutions run well. The same is true for cloud platforms. Find out what support and services your company may need before selecting a vendor so that you know what to ask for and compare.

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And 5 Questions You Should Ask Your Potential Cloud Platform Solution Provider

QUESTION #6 How does your cloud platform keep my business safe from security threats? Find out what security features, services and compatibilities the prospective vendor solution has. Keep in mind especially the compatibilities with other security solutions, such as Identity and Access Management solutions. The combination of two compatible, best-fit solutions to your business and security needs merits your consideration.

QUESTION #7 How does your cloud solution work with the rest of my business and technology environment? Cloud solutions can get along very easily with the rest of your infrastructure, but if you are going to need extensive tie-in between the cloud platform and the rest of your business, ensuring all the technological pieces fit together will be well worth your time.

QUESTION #8 What support offerings do you have? Support can be critical to ensuring the success of implementation and operation. Compare the different support options your prospective vendors are offering and see how well they align with the support needs you have determined from Question 5.

QUESTION #9 How easy would it be to switch from one solution to another if things don’t work out? Let’s face it, sometimes the solution that looked the best for your business turns out not to be a great fit. Ask the vendor upfront and directly how they will help you move away from their solution and towards someone else’s if something goes wrong (don’t settle for “it won’t go wrong”). Their response will shine light on the business flexibility and risk the company and solution provide, as well as potentially the culture of the company with whom you’re thinking of working.

QUESTION #10 Cost(s)? Don’t be fooled into thinking this means only asking about the price on the sticker. With almost every solution, there are likely to be hidden costs as well. Consider that “free” open-source solution, for instance; without support and other enterprise-focused service offerings, you could at the very least find the need to siphon off critical IT resources from other projects. At most, you might confront the high costs of a failed initiative. Opportunity costs should also be considered for what you could do with certain IT resources and money.

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CLOUD PLATFORM SOLUTION DIRECTORY

PROVIDER SOLUTION FROM THE COMPANY

ActiveState Software Stackato 3.0 “Stackato allows agile enterprises to develop and 409 Granville Street Stackato is a commercially supported deploy software solutions faster than ever before Vancouver, BC V6C 1T2 Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that is and manage them more effectively. Stackato Canada built with and on top of various open provides development teams with built-in languages, frameworks and services on +1 (778) 786-1100 source components such as Cloud one single cloud application platform, while providing enterprise-level security www.activestate.com Foundry and Docker. and world-class support.”

Amazon, Inc. Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)™ “ EC2 presents a true cloud hosting service, 1200 12th Ave. South EC2 is a web service that provides allowing you to use web service interfaces to launch Seattle, WA 98144 resizable compute capacity in the cloud. instances with a variety of operating systems, load United States It is designed to make web-scale them with your custom application environment, manage your network’s access +1 ( 206) 266-1000 computing easier for developers. permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.” aws.amazon.com

Apprenda, Inc. Enterprise PaaS “Most PaaS offerings focus on providing deploy 3 Corporate Drive Apprenda provides a foundational and manage value, which significantly reduces Clifton Park, NY 120651 software layer and application run-time dev ops and IT burdens, but does little to United States environment that abstracts away the accelerate application development or reduce project cost burdens. Apprenda +1 (518) 383-2130 complexities of building and delivering provides a variety of architecture services and frameworks that satisfy a number www.apprenda.com modern cloud applications. of typical requirements and cross cutting concerns of most web and SOA apps.”

CA Technologies AppLogic® Cloud Platform “CA AppLogic Cloud Platform makes the One CA Plaza A turnkey platform that ensures and software defined a reality. You’ll be Islandia, NY 11749 delivers business services via a SaaS able to build a cloud computing environment in United States model. All hardware and software grid just hours, including the features needed to operate and manage the cloud. By +1 (800) 225-5224 components are virtualized and become using virtual appliances to eliminate the binding of software to hardware, CA www.ca.com accessible via a catalog of virtual AppLogic enables you to offer IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and private cloud.” appliances.

CenturyLink CenturyLink Cloud Platform “CenturyLink Cloud Platform offers on- 1100 112th Avenue NE Lets you use Platform to demand provisioning of high-performing Bellevue, WA 98004 host web applications to a dedicated virtual machines with any combination of United States environment optimized for .NET, Java, , storage, and memory. Our virtual servers rely on fully +1 (877) 388-4373 Ruby, Node.js, PHP and Python redundant enterprise-class hardware connected through private high-speed www.centurylinkcloud.com applications. virtual LANs. Hyperscale instances offer higher storage performance for NoSQL workloads and web-scale architectures.”

Citrix Systems, Inc. CloudPlatform “Based on open source Apache CloudStack, 851 W. Cypress Creek Rd An application-centric, cloud orchest- CloudPlatform is the industry’s most flexible and Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33309 ration platform featuring an open open cloud orchestration platform. Choose the United States architecture. Menu-driven web interface , storage and network technologies that are right for your cloud and +1 (800) 424-8749 for administrators and users. leverage industry standard Amazon Web Service APIs and the rich partner www.citrix.com ecosystem to expand and integrate value-added solutions and services.”

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PROVIDER SOLUTION FROM THE COMPANY

CloudBees, Inc. Continuous Delivery Platform “CloudBees provides a base package and then 400 TradeCenter CloudBees reliably provisions and wires together all the services Woburn, MA 01801 provides a set of services that allow you select. As you scale up and down throughout the United States developers to build and run new web development process, you add or subtract new services, run builds, test and roll +1 (323) 843-4483 and mobile business applications and out new applications or enhancements. Meanwhile, CloudBees transparently www.cloudbees.com integrate them with other services. handles all the underlying changes to keep your application up at all times.” cloudControl GmbH dotCloud PaaS “The dotCloud Platform is a service provided by Helmholtzstraße 2-9, dotCloud lets you build your application cloudControl, Inc. The Platform launched in 2011 as 10587 Berlin, as a collection of services. dotCloud the industry’s first multi-language Platform as a Germany runs each instance within a Service. The Platform simplifies application +49 30 609884890 container so users' applications do not development by allowing to focus just on the code for their service www.cloudcontrol.com interfere with each other and so no while the Platform handles code building, scaling, deployment and load- more memory is used than allocated. balancing.”

Cloudera, Inc. Cloudera Enterpise “Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data 220 Portage Avenue Cloudera delivers a data management management by offering the first unified Platform Palo Alto, CA 94306 platform that’s powered by Hadoop. for Big Data: The Enterprise Data Hub. Cloudera United States Cloudera Enterprise offers management offers enterprises one place to store, process and analyze all their data, +1 (888) 789-1488 software and support to form a scalable empowering them to extend the value of existing investments while enabling www.cloudera.com solution. fundamental new ways to derive value from their data.”

Dell Software Cloud Manager “Dell Multi-Cloud Manager (formerly ) 1201 Marquette Ave A cloud infrastructure management enables deployment and management of enterprise- Minneapolis, MN 55403 solution for deploying and managing class applications across private, public and hybrid United States enterprise-class applications in public, clouds. It provides a suite of tools for managing your cloud infrastructure, +1 (612) 746-3091 private and hybrid clouds. including the provisioning, management and automation of applications across www.enstratius.com the leading private and public cloud platforms.”

Engine Yard, Inc. “We started Engine Yard to meet a genuine 500 Third Street A cloud application management need—developers were building business- , CA 94107 platform empowering developers and critical applications but didn’t United States DevOps to provision, manage, monitor want to worry about application deployment, management and scaling. We assist +1 (866) 518-9273 and control applications in the public with small to large deployments, of any instance size, across a spectrum of and private cloud. www.engineyard.com applications ranging from SaaS, mobile, eCommerce, interactive websites, marketing campaigns and healthcare.”

GigaSpaces Tech, Inc. Cloudify “Automate and orchestrate your DevOps 110 East 42 St Cloudify’s open-source cloud process with Cloudify’s free, open source New York, NY 10017 orchestration software platform software platform. Easily setup, deploy, United States provides deployment, management and monitor, auto-repair and scale your mission critical applications. Future-proof +1 (646) 421-2830 automatic scaling of complex, your apps to run on OpenStack at a later stage and move to OpenStack when you www.gigaspaces.com enterprise applications on the cloud. are ready without any additional investment.”

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PROVIDER SOLUTION FROM THE COMPANY

Google, Inc. Cloud Platform “Virtual machines. Managed platform. Blob storage. 1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy App Engine is a fully-managed PaaS Block storage. NoSQL datastore. MySQL . Mountain View, CA with managed services, such as Task Big Data analytics enables 94043 Queues, Memcache and the Users API. developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s highly-scalable and United States Compute Engine is an IaaS that lets you reliable infrastructure. Choose from computing, storage and application services +1(650) 253-0000 run workloads on virtual machines for your web, mobile and backend solutions.” cloud.google.com hosted on Google's infrastructure.

Hewlett-Packard Co. HP Helion “HP Cloud is built on a common architecture, powered by HP 3000 Hanover Street HP offers a unified solution across Cloud OS. We deliver the industry's most comprehensive hybrid Palo Alto, CA 94304 private and public clouds. HP Helion is delivery strategy and solution portfolio across private, United States an open source- based, public cloud that managed, and public clouds, as well as traditional IT. And we +1 (650) 857-1501 integrates HP hardware and software can even help you determine what type of cloud solution will work best for your www.hp.com with OpenStack technology. business.”

IBM Corporation IBM SmartCloud “Built upon open standards combined with deep IBM 1 New Orchard Road IBM SmartCloud is a family of expertise and best practices, SmartCloud is designed Armonk, NY 10504 integrated enterprise-class cloud for complex high-performance computing environ- United States computing technologies and services ments. SmartCloud goes beyond securely delivering +1 (877) 257-5227 for securely building and using private, new cloud efficiencies and cost savings to drive fundamental innovation for www..com public and hybrid clouds. lasting marketplace advantage.”

Joyent, Inc. SmartDataCenter “ is the high-performance cloud infra- One Embarcadero Center A cloud management solution for structure and big data analytics company, offering San Francisco, CA 94111 and network , operations organizations of any size the best public and hybrid United States management and self-service. It is the cloud infrastructure for today's demanding real-time web and mobile +1 (855) 456-9368 software that runs the Joyent Cloud and applications. Our service powers the fastest-growing and most innovative mobile, can be used to provide, public, private, www.joyent.com social, media & entertainment, e-commerce, financial services and service and hybrid clouds on customer provider companies.” premises.

Mendix, Inc. Cloud “The Mendix App Platform empowers businesses 268 Summer Street Open architecture provides developers to build and deploy powerful multi-device Boston, MA 02210 with tools and APIs to integrate with applications in record time. By combining rapid, United States and extend applications and app model-driven development, social collaboration, agile project management, +1 (857) 263-8200 services. Can be deployed as a private enterprise integration, and secure cloud deployment, Mendix seamlessly supports www.mendix.com cloud or with other IaaS providers such the entire application lifecycle, eliminating the traditional bottlenecks, costs, and as AWS, IBM or on premise. risks associated with application delivery.”

Microsoft Azure “Azure is Microsft’s cloud platform: a growing One Way Azure supports any operating system, collection of integrated services—compute, Redmond, WA 98052 language, tool, and framework— from storage, data, networking, and app. Azure is the United States Windows to Linux, SQL Server to Oracle, only major cloud platform ranked by Gartner as an industry leader for both +1 (425) 882-8080 C# to Java. Build and deploy a wide infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This powerful www.microsoft.com variety of applications for Android, iOS, combination of managed and unmanaged services lets you build, deploy, and and Windows. Azure also provides manage applications any way you like for unmatched productivity.” managed SQL and NoSQL data services.

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PROVIDER SOLUTION FROM THE COMPANY

Red Hat, Inc. OpenShift Enterprise “OpenShift Enterprise enables enterprise IT 100 East Davie Street An on-premise, private Platform-as-a- organizations with requirements around Raleigh, NC 27601 Service solution offering a choice of security, data privacy, compliance and/or United States programming languages and governance to implement a private PaaS that keeps you in control while +1 (919) 754-4950 frameworks, databases and managing the needs of your business. Whether you are in application www..com development tools. development, operations or are an Architect there are benefits for you.”

Oracle Corporation Platform “Oracle Cloud provides a shared and elastically 500 Oracle Parkway Oracle Could Platform leverages scalable platform for consolidation of existing Redwood Shores, CA standards-based shared services, and applications and new application development and deployment. The Oracle Cloud 94065 elastic scalability on demand and Platform delivers cost savings through standardization and higher utilization of United States includes database functionality based the shared platform across multiple applications. Oracle offers a broad portfolio +1 (650) 506-7000 on and Oracle Exadata of software and hardware products and services to enable public, private, and www.oracle.com Database Machine. hybrid clouds.”

OrangeScape, Inc. OrangeScape PaaS Platform “OrangeScape uses a modeling driven visual 800 West El Camino Real OrangeScape PaaS Platform helps you development environment for creating Mountain View, CA build business applications using a business applications and can be deployed as Cloud Apps, SaaS or on-premise 94040 visual style modeling interface in a 5GL applications. OrangeScape leverages the cloud infrastructure of Google App United States environment. This is done through Engine, , Amazon AWS and Private Clouds to provide massive +1 (650) 394-7227 OrangeScape Studio on browser. scalability and storage capacity. www.orangescape.com

OutSystems OutSystems Platform “OutSystems provides the open, rapid 5901 Peachtree OutSystems Platform is an open application delivery platform (PaaS) that makes Dunwoody applications platform (Paas) solution it easy to develop apps once and deliver Atlanta, GA 30328 designed for public and private cloud, seamlessly across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Web - deeply integrated United States on-premises or hybrid deployments. It with existing cloud and on-premises databases and systems of record. +1 (404) 719-5100 combines full productivity and full OutSystems Platform enables rapid delivery of beautiful applications for all www.outsystems.com application lifecycle management. devices utilizing responsive or device-specific web design.”

Pivotal Software, Inc. Pivotal CF “Pivotal CF is a comprehensive PaaS that can be 3495 Deer Creek Road An enterprise-cloud platform, powered deployed on multiple cloud environments to Palo Alto, CA 94304 by and VMware cloud deliver a turnkey experience for scaling and United States infrastructure products Pivotal CF also updating PaaS with no downtime. Pivotal CF Services help create a PaaS +1 (650) 846-1600 allows data services to run on top of ecosystem with differentiated data services such as Mobile, Hadoop, Visual www.pivotal.io Cloud Foundry. Analytics, Messaging and MySQL.”

Progress Software Corp. Progress Pacific “Progress Pacific is a modern Platform-as-a- 14 Oak Park Drive Can be deployed on-premise or in the Service (PaaS) that makes it easy for Bedford, MA 01730 cloud and enables the rapid creation businesses to rapidly build data-driven apps and deploy them on any cloud or United States and deployment of data-driven business device. The Pacific PaaS gives you the freedom to choose the data sources, +1 (781) 280-4000 applications with minimal coding by deployment environments and business logic that best fit your needs. Support www.progress.com using point-and-click, drag-and-drop your enterprise, developers and customers with cloud-enabled applications and tools in a web browser. grow into new markets with Progress Pacific.”

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PROVIDER SOLUTION FROM THE COMPANY

Rackspace, Inc. Managed Public and Private Clouds “With a Managed Private Cloud from 1 Fanatical Place Rackspace offers public and managed Rackspace, we take care of the infrastructure City of Windcrest cloud infractructures as well as private and management, giving you the cloud San Antonio, TX clouds built in a choice of three stacks expertise you need and letting you focus on your core business. We are one of United States – Vmware, Microsoft Cloud OS and the largest hosting partners of VMware and Microsoft, and we're one of the +1 (800) 961-2888 Rackspace OpenStack. Other Cloud founders of the OpenStack open-source cloud initiative, so we have the www.rackspace.com offerings include: servers, sites, expertise and breadth of portfolio to give you the cloud you need, no matter databases and Big Data. your requirements.”

SAP SE SAP HANA In-Memory Platform “Now more than ever, developers need the right Dietmar-Hopp-Allee 16 SAP HANA Cloud Platform is an open- platform to quickly extend, build and run cloud 69190 Walldorf standard, Eclipse-based modular business applications. SAP HANA Cloud Platform is Germany platform as a service. Build, setup and the Platform-as-a-Service purpose-built to meet the exacting needs of modern +49 (0)6227 / 7-47474 deploy applications that feature mobile, developers. With comprehensive services and capabilities, the world's best www.sap.com collaboration, big data and analytics developers depend on HANA Cloud Platform to build better apps in less time.” services.

Salesforce.com Inc. Salesforce1 Lightning Platform “Developers everywhere are using Force.com for The Landmark Build apps with drag-and-drop business application development, creating cloud 1 Market, Suite 300 components and design your apps computing applications like enterprise resource planning San Francisco, CA 94105 specific to any screen — phone, tablet, (ERP), human resource management (HRM), and supply United States , desktop, or wearable. Leverage chain management (SCM). Force.com is a set of tools and services that make it + 1 (415) 901-7040 pre-built components from faster and easier to create employee-facing applications that are instantly social salesforce.com and AppExchange partners, or have your and mobile. The Salesforce1 Platform allows you to create apps without worrying developers write their own components. about hardware or infrastructure. So IT can focus solely on building apps and driving business results.”

Software AG AgileApps Cloud “webMethods AgileApps Cloud is a Business Uhlandstr. 12 A cloud-native, shared-everything, multi- Process Management (BPM) and application D-64297 Darmstadt tenant platform. It can be deployed in a Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) that allows the Germany two-tier architecture using the Tomcat subject matter experts, as well as developers, to visually build and deploy +49 6151 92-0 application server and MySQL database. process-driven, application solutions. The AgileApps Live platform empowers www.softwareag.com It’s available as a service in the cloud business to have a better way to track and manage service requests, respond to but can also be installed on a client’s incidents and resolve investigations.” premises or in their public cloud utilizing hosting partners.

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