The 20 Coolest Cloud Platforms And Development Vendors Of The 2014 Cloud 100

Coolest Cloud Platforms And Development Vendors For 2014

Rapid innovation and fast growth are par for the course in the Platform-as-a-Service market. Researcher IDC sees the market soaring from just $3.8 billion in 2012 to $14 billion in 2017. Some signs of the fast growth from the CRN Coolest Cloud Platforms and Development list: a 225 percent sales increase for Apprenda in 2013 and a 901 percent five-year growth rate for MuleSoft. Companies employing the platforms, meanwhile, are seeing huge cost reduction, including data center cost reduction of two-thirds for companies using Eucalyptus.

Apprenda

Co-Founder and CEO: Sinclair Schuller

Apprenda posted a 225 percent sales growth in 2014, with 13 leading financial institutions now using the platform, including JPMorgan Chase. The JPMorgan Chase return on investment: a 300 percent increase in infrastructure utilization and a 700 percent increase in developer productivity.

CloudBees

Founder and CEO: Sacha Labourey

CloudBees is a visionary in researcher Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Platforms as a Service. Founder Labourey hit it out of the park as one of the core contributors of JBoss -- acquired by Red Hat. Now he's leading the PaaS paradigm shift.

CumuLogic

CEO: Mike Soby

CumuLogic's board of advisers includes Java language inventor Dr. James Gosling and Bud Albers, former CTO for Disney's Interactive Media Group. The company's ambitious vision: a platform that "prevents vendor lock-in and is agnostic to clouds, hypervisors and application infrastructure."

Docker

CEO: Ben Golub

Docker just completed $15 million in Series B funding led by Greylock Partners. The company also just hired Roger Egan, former vice president of channels at Red Hat, as senior vice president of revenue and channels. There have been more than 400,000 downloads of the open-source container since it was launched nearly a year ago.

Engine Yard

CEO: John Dillon

Backed by, among others, Amazon and Oracle, Engine Yard is taking business-critical Platform-as-a-Service security to a new level. The company recently named Jeff Reich, a 30-year security and risk management veteran, as chief security officer.

Eucalyptus Systems

CEO: Marten Mickos

Touting API compatibility with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Eucalyptus bills itself as the "de facto private cloud reference implementation for AWS." The payback: Some Eucalyptus users have "cut cloud spending by as much as 50 percent and reduced data center spend by two-thirds."

GigaSpaces

CEO: Zeev Bikowsky

GigaSpaces makes OpenStack deployment as simple as click-and-go with its Cloudify open-source application management platform. The company recently launched Cloudify Application Catalog on the OpenStack-based HP public cloud, pledging "single click deployment" for nearly any app.

Morphlabs

Co-Founder and CEO: Winston Damarillo

Co-founder Damarillo has successfully sold three super-cool tech startups to established companies. The company has raised $22.5 million in venture funds to fuel growth of its mCloud open-source offering. A partnership with NEC has paid off with robust Asia market penetration.

MuleSoft

President and CEO: Greg Schott

The company's Anypoint cloud/SaaS integration platform is being used by 35 percent of the Global 500, including WalMart and Salesforce.com, and was named to Deloitte Technology Fast 500 with a five-year growth rate of 901 percent. Blue-chip investors include Salesforce.com, SAP Ventures and Hummer Winblad.

Parallels

CEO: Birger Steen

Parallels offers a breakthrough platform for hosters looking to deploy and manage Microsoft's latest and greatest software, including Hyper-V on Windows Azure. More than 9,000 service providers now use Parallels cloud services enablement. The company has seen a more than 400 percent increase in partners using the Parallels PartnerNet portal.

Piston Cloud Computing

CEO: Jim Morrisroe

Morrisroe, who played a key role in groupware Zimbra's success, is leading the enterprise OpenStack charge at Piston. Key Piston OpenStack advantages: scalability and security. The company, so far, has raised $12.5 million from top-notch investors, including Cisco.

Pivotal Software

CEO: Paul Maritz

Pivotal Software is the gold standard for multicloud big data Platform-as-a-Service. Maritz's technology foresight is unmatched. Signs of progress: a strategic partnership with SP500 power CapGemini to create the Business Data Lake and the hiring of former eBay Platforms Vice President Hugh Williams.

Puppet Labs

Founder and CEO: Luke Kanies

A leader in IT automation software for system administrators, Puppet Labs posted more than 100 percent sales growth in the fourth quarter 2013, and ranked as the 66th fastest-growing company in America by Deloitte. The company has sold more than 250,000 enterprise licenses.

Ravello Systems

Co-Founder, Chairman and President: Benny Schnaider

Founded by the team that delivered the breakthrough KVM hypervisor for Linux, Ravello has brought to market what it calls the world's first Cloud Application Hypervisor. The payback: two times better performance on Amazon Web Services with virtual machine consolidation.

Red Hat

President and CEO: Jim Whitehurst

Red Hat got high marks for channel leadership with a channel program aimed at helping solution providers build OpenStack clouds and making improvements to deal registration. The company's deepening ties with Cisco with "Journey To The Open Cloud" playbooks could lead to big gains in hybrid cloud functionality.

RightScale

Co-Founder and CEO: Michael Crandell

RightScale recently launched two big game-changers: a cloud management/analytics appliance for VMware VSphere and RightScale Cloud Analytics, an enterprise-grade cloud cost-management offering. RightScale was the first partner to resell the Google Compute Engine with tailored on-boarding packages.

ScaleXtreme

Co-Founder and CEO: Nand Mulchandani

ScaleXtreme's Mulchandani has pushed the technology envelope with several successful ventures, including Oblix (acquired by Oracle) and Determina (acquired by VMware). Its new Advanced Cloud Management product, recently made available, is already being used by Amazon Web Services, Terremark and Microsoft Azure.

Software AG

CEO: Karl-Heinz Streibich

Software AG acquired cloud Platform-as-a-Service vendor LongJump last year. The deal has given LongJump financial firepower to extend its market dominance into more small and midsize enterprises. Software AG was named a leader in researcher Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools.

StackDriver

Co-Founders: Izzy Azeri and Dan Belcher

The Monitoring-as-a-Service company is changing the game for Amazon Web Services customers looking to "proactively identify performance issues and bottlenecks." Closed a $10 million round of financing last September in order to meet a surge in customer demand.

Xively

CEO: Michael Simon

Billed as the first public cloud built for the Internet of Things, the Log Me In subsidiary is powering game-changing solutions. Elektron Technology, for example, is using the Xively platform to assure food safety with real-time monitoring of food storage with wireless sensors that record temperature and humidity.