The 20 Coolest Cloud Platform And Development Vendors Of The 2015 Cloud 100

Coolest Cloud Platform And Development Vendors For 2015

While the cloud infrastructure space is increasingly dominated by computing giants that make it difficult for any vendor without obscene financial resources to win market share, the platform and development arena is kinder to agile companies looking to make contributions to the emerging IT landscape. For that reason, this is where the innovation is happening.

At the same time, those IaaS behemoths are also moving up the stack. To make that point, this year we included Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform on this segment of our Cloud 100 list, indicative of the fact that the big boys are also offering developers the tools and environments they need to rapidly build and deploy innovative cloud-based applications.

Amazon Web Services

Jeff Bezos

CEO

AWS typically appears in the infrastructure segment of our Top 100 Coolest Cloud Vendors list. But the world's largest public cloud now offers so many features and development tools (in the neighborhood of 500), not to mention the Elastic Beanstalk platform and a DevOps certification, that we think it fits in this part of the list just as well.

AppDirect

Daniel Saks

President, Co-CEO

AppDirect is a pure-channel cloud services company that offers a solution to companies and solution providers struggling to identify the best SaaS products. AppDirect sells a platform that solution providers can white-label to create a self-branded marketplace where their customers can shop for and manage a portfolio of cloud-based applications.

Canonical

Mark Shuttleworth

Founder

As developer of Ubuntu, Canonical offers a Linux distribution extremely popular with developers. The latest Ubuntu release offers even closer integration with Docker and Cloud Foundry as well as an updated Juju orchestration tool that works to deploy rival operating systems.

Canopy

Philippe Llorens

CEO

Canopy, a joint venture of EMC, VMware and French IT solution provider Atos, revealed a new Platform-as-a-Service offering this year called Cloud Fabric built from the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. Cloud Fabric aims to meet the needs of enterprises and improve productivity for developers. Canopy has begun searching for North American channel partners to sell the product.

Citrix Systems

Mark Templeton

CEO

With Citrix Workspace Cloud, Citrix is bringing to market a cloud-based platform enabling the design and delivery of virtual desktops, applications and mobility services. The recently unveiled platform still in preview will enable channel partners to offer enterprises rapidly deployable, highly customized virtual desktops connected to multiple clouds. CEO Mark Templeton said the new offering would take enterprises "from zero to business-ready-desktop in a flash."

CoreOS

Alex Polvi

CEO

This lightweight Linux distribution optimized for massive server deployments introduced a new service called Managed Linux in 2014 that its developers describe as the world’s first OS-as-a-Service. The commercial entity that distributes the open-source CoreOS Linux distribution brought to market the monthly subscription service after closing a Series A funding round of $8.5 million.

Docker

Ben Golub

CEO

Docker broke out last year as what one Google executive dubbed "the de facto standard for Linux containers." That's not a bad place to be at a time when the potential of a technology that has been around for years is finally being fully understood in the context of a cloud-centric IT and development landscape. Partnerships with just about every major cloud provider, a burgeoning ecosystem and an enterprise-ready release make it seem likely Docker will continue making waves in 2015.

ElasticBox

Ravi Srivatsav (pictured), Alberto Arias Maestro

Co-founders

This startup focuses on simplifying the DevOps process by bringing together all components of the application stack in a modular, service-based application development process. The technology focuses on reusable application components and harnesses the power of popular orchestration and containerization tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt and Docker.

Engine Yard

Beau Vrolyk

CEO

Engine Yard’s popular cloud platform comes with an automation and orchestration engine that enables developers to build, deploy and manage scalable applications running in a variety of environments. A partner program provides add-on services and a strategic alliance with Microsoft enables developers to use Engine Yard’s platform to build and deploy applications on the Azure cloud.

Google

Larry Page

CEO

For some time many suspected that Google really wasn’t all that serious about leveraging the power of its cloud platform to compete for enterprise business through a vibrant channel. With this year’s brand launch of Google For Work, however, it seems the computing giant has signaled its intent on becoming a serious enterprise player. And Google App Engine remains among the most popular PaaS offerings on the market, granting developers a powerful platform to build applications to run on Google’s world-class infrastructure.

Mirantis

Adrian Ionel

CEO

Mirantis is the largest of the pure-play OpenStack developers and a leading force behind the movement for open-source cloud infrastructure. The vendor’s OpenStack distribution seeks to offer enterprises an easier way to deploy, manage and upgrade their cloud infrastructure. The distribution comes with a toolkit for deploying and managing OpenStack clouds, works with multiple operating systems and incorporates a variety of third-party plugins.

MuleSoft

Greg Schott

President, CEO

MuleSoft’s integration Platform-as-a-Service enables weaving together multiple applications and data sources. MuleSoft also offers developers a hub for assembling information about thousands of APIs, helping them build integrated projects in on-premise data centers or in the cloud. The integration platform, Anypoint, remains a popular enterprise technology and has been showered with accolades.

Oracle

Larry Ellison

Executive Chairman, CTO

Just a year ago, if you saw Oracle on this list you would do a double-take and then check your glasses. But after much hesitance, the software giant is moving its enterprise products to the cloud. And execs have been touting Oracle’s PaaS offerings, including cloud middleware, database, Java, security and identity-management services that enable integrating and extending SaaS applications.

Parallels

Birger Steen

CEO

Parallels says more than 10,000 service providers utilize its technology to deliver applications and cloud services to more than 10 million SMB customers. Last year the company surpassed one million deployed virtual containers, solidified a deal with Ingram Micro and became the first company to support the new Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program with a SmartStart for Office 365.

Pivotal

Paul Maritz

CEO

This joint venture between EMC and VMware is the driving force behind Cloud Foundry, which many industry experts believe is the most-exciting open-source PaaS project out there. Cloud Foundry may end up being to the cloud platform layer in the way that OpenStack is proving to be to the cloud infrastructure layer. Pivotal CF is a popular commercial distribution. The company is also bringing to market innovative big data and analytics products.

Puppet Labs

Luke Kanies

Founder and CEO

This configuration management software vendor offers Puppet Enterprise, a commercially supported version of its popular open-source orchestration platform. Now with several large funding rounds and a strong partnership with partial owner VMware, it’ll be interesting to see what comes next as newcomers have heated up the data center automation market.

Red Hat

James Whitehurst

CEO

Red Hat’s OpenShift is a major contender in the increasingly competitive and attention-grabbing PaaS arena. OpenShift is now partnering with Docker to enable Linux containers, with scheduling and management support from Kubernetes. The developer’s Enterprise OpenShift is a popular choice for private cloud operators looking to create environments for rapid application development and deployment.

Scribe Software

Shawn McGowan

President, CEO

Scribe Software, a developer of data integration solutions, previewed its first Integration Platform-as-a-Service in 2014. It’s an offering intended to provide the company’s channel partners a turnkey solution for integrating data produced from on-premise and cloud-based applications. The new capability for Scribe’s cloud platform, Scribe Online, was developed with a focus on midmarket businesses and, in another first for the company, will be sold through a white-label program to channel partners at wholesale prices.

Shippable

Avi Cavale

CEO

This startup offers a continuous integration and delivery platform built from Docker containers. Development teams can use the product to rapidly integrate and test code before deploying it onto on-premise infrastructure or public clouds.

Zenoss

Greg Stock

CEO

The company behind this open-source application, server and network management platform launched a channel program near the end of 2014. The vendor has recognized that a vibrant channel is the most effective way to meet the growing demand for a product used by enterprises and managed services providers alike to monitor dynamic IT environments, from on-premise data centers, to virtualized cloud and converged IT infrastructures.