Accelerating App Delivery How aPaaS Enables Fast Delivery & Continuous Innovation Issue 1 2 Welcome 2 Resources 3 From the Gartner Files: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Worldwide 32 About Mendix Featuring research from 2 Welcome Innovate or perish. That’s the reality facing every business, regardless of industry. The need to deliver modern, multi-channel applications that engage customers and empower employees has never been more urgent. Yet, fast-growing project backlogs and unhappy business sponsors are clear indications that traditional development approaches aren’t cutting it. Enterprise application Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) offers a much-needed way forward, promising to accelerate your application delivery cadence and capacity. But the market is crowded, and not all aPaaS offerings are created equal. In Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as Service (aPaaS), Mendix was positioned as a “Visionary” due to its completeness of vision and ability to execute. Use this complimentary Gartner report to better understand and navigate the aPaaS landscape and ultimately select the platform best suited to your organization’s priorities. Resources In addition to Gartner’s perspective, we have [Video] aPaaS Success Stories included four resources to illustrate how Mendix See how Mendix customers, such as Dun & supports customers through their digital journeys, Bradstreet, LV= Insurance, The Boston Globe empowering them to deliver the right apps with and Kao, are rapidly delivering custom apps that unprecedented speed. differentiate their business. Watch video → Successful App Delivery for the Digital Age Find out how to keep your IT team on track and [Video] The Mendix App Platform Tour quickly deliver the multi-channel, multi-device Take a two-minute tour of the Mendix App apps needed to digitize your business. Platform to see how companies all over the world Get eBook → create enterprise web and mobile applications faster and better than ever. The ultimate guide to aPaaS Watch video → Ready to move forward? Find out how aPaaS fits into the PaaS landscape, why it’s a must-have Source: Mendix for enterprises, and key questions to ask as you evaluate vendors. Get eBook → 3 From the Gartner Files: Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Worldwide Application platform technology Magic Quadrant innovation has moved to the cloud, as CIOs, IT planners and architects, driven by the demands of cloud, mobile and FIGURE 1 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platform as a Service, Worldwide IoT, seek innovation in technology and business. We examine the most prominent vendor offerings designed to support and advance these initiatives. Market Definition/Description Application infrastructure functionality, enriched with cloud characteristics and offered as a service, is platform as a service (PaaS). Gartner refers to it more precisely as cloud application infrastructure services. Application platform as a service (aPaaS) is a form of PaaS that provides a platform to support application development, deployment and execution in the cloud. It is a suite of cloud services designed to meet the prevailing application design requirements of the time, and, in 2015, includes mobile, cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data analytics innovations. An aPaaS that is designed to support the enterprise style of applications and application projects (high availability, disaster recovery, security and technical support) is an enterprise aPaaS. This market includes only companies that Source: Gartner (March 2015) provide public aPaaS offerings (vendors providing aPaaS-enabling software alone are not considered). See “Platform as a Service: Definition, Taxonomy and Vendor Landscape, 2014” or “Hype Cycle for Platform as a Service (PaaS), 2014” for an expanded form of the definition of aPaaS and other forms of cloud application infrastructure services (xPaaS). 4 Vendor Strengths and Cautions • The vendor’s white-label aPaaS program offering for telecommunications companies and cloudControl IaaS providers provides a potentially powerful mechanism for expanding geographical cloudControl is a European vendor that provides coverage by acting as a force multiplier for a high-control, multilanguage, shared-OS aPaaS cloudControl sales and marketing. deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers. In August 2014, cloudControl added to its Cautions geographic coverage and doubled its customers when it bought the dotCloud North American • cloudControl’s use of the dotCloud brand in aPaaS business from Docker. The underlying North America and its use of a white-label technology of the dotCloud aPaaS is being shifted program for expansion into other geographies to the technology used by the cloudControl aPaaS limit the vendor’s ability to grow worldwide instances (applications built for dotCloud have recognition of the cloudControl brand. As a to be migrated by May 2015), but the U.S.-based smaller competitor in the aPaaS market, this aPaaS will continue to operate under the dotCloud could create a challenge to cloudControl’s name, running on Google Compute Engine and long-term market positioning. offering an alternative infrastructure to the AWS- based cloudControl branded PaaS. The vendor • Its use of so many add-on partners for advanced also offers a white-label aPaaS program, mostly to capabilities increases cloudControl’s external telecommunications companies and infrastructure dependencies, and revenue sharing with these as a service (IaaS) providers, where cloudControl partners reduces cloudControl’s net revenue. provides its aPaaS as a managed layer on top of the partner’s IaaS offering. Exoscale, in • Slow growth of an ecosystem of SaaS Switzerland, is an example of a white-label partner. providers that have built their applications on cloudControl’s platform may be a handicap All of the U.S., European and white-label inasmuch as the extension and customization implementations provide the same developer of SaaS applications are major drivers of and runtime services with the same APIs, the aPaaS adoption in mainstream enterprise IT same levels of support, and the same pricing organizations. arrangements. In addition to its buildpack-based deployment model, cloudControl offers an add-on • Without high-productivity development marketplace where users can leverage more than services for application development and 40 third-party services in areas such as continuous integration, business process management integration and deployment, log management, (BPM), and event processing, cloudControl email, search, security, data management, revenue opportunities will be limited to a analytics, and message queuing. subset of the market for enterprise PaaS services. Strengths Engine Yard • The vendor has over 1,400 registered customer accounts with more than 800 active deployments Engine Yard is a cloud-based, shared-hardware, across its dotCloud and cloudControl branded high-control aPaaS that uses a dedicated services. Overall revenue from aPaaS services has environment for each tenant. The platform been growing through the dotCloud acquisition, supports a limited set of languages and the white-label program and organic growth. frameworks: Originally focused just on Ruby on Rails, Engine Yard now also supports Java, Node. • Support of the buildpack specification enables js and PHP. Each supported environment is a cloudControl, its partners and its customers to managed and curated infrastructure stack with a extend the platform with new language engines, configurable composition. frameworks, databases and other software services available from other vendors that Founded in 2006, Engine Yard was a pioneer in the support buildpacks. The vendor provides and PaaS market. The platform caters to professional supports many buildpacks, but developers can developers looking for a low-level platform that create their own to expand the technologies that hides and automates system administration of an they can use. underlying IaaS. (The platform runs on, and Engine Yard resells, AWS, Azure and Verizon Terremark.) 5 For an aPaaS, Engine Yard provides exceptionally environments that benefit most from manual deep control of the underlying environment. In and preplanned approaches to changing fact, the vendor now refers to the platform as a capacity. cloud application management platform, rather than aPaaS, indicating a shift in focus from aPaaS • Engine Yard is primarily focused on alleviating to utilitarian service provider. Applications run subscribers’ responsibilities for managing directly on the host infrastructure, and subscribers system infrastructure, but not to the point of have full root access to the virtual servers. For relinquishing control of those system resources. example, subscribers can define custom Chef Although the abstraction level provided does recipes to configure the servers. The platform qualify as PaaS, much of the design and many supports manual and scheduled scaling, but no of the use cases for Engine Yard are close to dynamic autoscaling. what Gartner calls “IaaS+.” Strengths • The vendor does not provide its own integration, BPM, big data and analytics • Engine Yard has over 1,500 Web 2.0 and capabilities, nor does it offer a model-driven, digital business clients. It provides a solid high-productivity cloud platform environment. foundation for DevOps and continuous delivery. Those looking for an application platform It remains the leading aPaaS for Ruby