During the HP Discover there was not much coverage about it, but as Ben Kepes found out, HP extends its cloud portfolio with a private platform-as-a-service (PaaS). The platform based on Stackato, which is a fork of Cloud Foundry.
HP Platform-as-a-Service
HP itself describes the new enterprise focused platform as an application platform for the developing, deployment and management of cloud based applications, regardless of the language and stack.
Partnership with ActiveState
To offer the new PaaS, HP partners with ActiveState the driving force behind Stackato. Therefore HP takes an OEM license of Stackato to integrate the PaaS into the own cloud infrastructure.
For ActiveState it looks like a small knightly accolade. Usually, one should assume that a big company like HP has the expertise to develop a PaaS on its own. But it shows, that Stackato apparently fits into HPs infrastructure.
What ist Stackato?
Stackato allows developers to use a wide range of different programming languages including Java, Ruby, Python, Perl, Node.js and PHP. It’s a typical polyglot PaaS.
The Platform-as-a-Service market
PaaS is the fastest growing segment in the cloud computing market. According to Gartner, we will see a steady growth in the next five years from 1.2 billion USD in 2012 to 2.9 billion USD in 2016. By comparison, 900 million USD in 2011. Gartner also expects, that each big software vendor will have its own PaaS in the market until the end of 2013.
