Apprenda  has been around for a few years now. We were one of the very early pioneers in PaaS, and proud of that fact purely because it means we understood market pains well before anyone else. Although I don’t believe in first mover advantage as *the* key ingredient to success, it does allow a company like ours to learn a lot from customers and shape our approach to the market accordingly. The lessons we learned as a business allow us to provide customers with technology value that is much higher on the maturity curve when compared to the rest of the market. This is part of the reason that although we are lumped into the PaaS category with every other vendor, Apprenda is a very different beast. Most PaaS offerings focus on app deployment (just look at the core messaging for CloudFoundry – “Deploy & Scale Your Application in Seconds”); Apprenda is better at app management then anyone else, but our passion is in giving developers a runtime and framework for next generation application architectures – enterprise cloud applications.

Apprenda has been successful in attracting some of the world’s biggest companies to our PaaS for a few reasons:

1. We are not pedantic about the public/private debate. As an open PaaS, customers can deploy the Apprenda PaaS layer on public or private infrastructure. We’ve focused on the customer and not the ideology, meaning that organizations can tailor their PaaS deployment to their needs, rather than tailor their needs to the PaaS.
2. Apprenda does application management better than any other PaaS. When customers push an application to an Apprenda cloud, they are guaranteed a low friction app management environment that gets rid of distractions from their dev cycles.
3. We are the only PaaS on the market that actually focuses on equipping developers with technology that allows them to write standard web and SOA apps that are enhanced with extraordinary architecture capabilities. Need to write a multi-tenant app? Write it as a standard app and Apprenda can “inject” SaaS DNA into the app. Think of this platform service as if it were “Architecture Patterns as a Service.”
4. Our deep instrumentation with Windows and .NET puts Apprenda on a different value curve than a general purpose PaaS. Being so focused on one runtime ensures that we can do things no other PaaS’ can do.
5. We can evidence real success in mission critical production scenarios. We value and trumpet the customer succeeding (which only happens in production), and not in our success in winning the customer. Getting selected as a vendor is merely the first step in the journey for customers.

One of our customers, AmerisourceBergen, recently did a case study with us focused on their production use of Apprenda. AmerisourceBergen’s case study embodies the value of not just private PaaS in the enterprise, but specifically of the challenges that only Apprenda can uniquely solve around key application workloads. What we found in practice that enterprises need a platform that flattens all major application management tasks to trivial workflows *and* that can solve some sticky architecture issues. Our case study focuses on the specific value AmeriSourceBergen achieved by using Apprenda. You can download the case study here. The thing to note is that no other PaaS offering on the market today can replicate the value we provide.

AmerisourceBergen experienced an 18 month acceleration in time to market while spending 50% less capital on development, and getting an 80% developer productivity boost. How in the world did this happen?

It’s important to be very clear: devops/noops/whateverops cannot provide the value listed above. Nothing about application management even takes 18 months that a standard PaaS could cutout to even make this claim. So what makes Apprenda different and where did we find 18 months to save? Apprenda focuses on helping developers make each line of code be architecturally rich, and not just on removing tasks that are distractions to developers (devops). In AmerisourceBergen’s case, things like multi-tenancy at the app tier , which only Apprenda can do right now, means that developers can save a huge number of calendar months on their project schedules for any multi-tenant application workloads. Building multi-tenancy into a data model, logic model, etc. is extraordinarily expensive to do correctly. This sort of ability to enhance an application and cut this sort of work out of a project’s requirements list is how a PaaS can really move the needle. I wrote about this topic of PaaS as an application enhancing runtime recently.

Apprenda focuses on empowering developers with the ability to use standard programming models to achieve extraordinary architectural outcomes. We make regular apps better, not just help deploy apps. Only this approach can drive metrics like the ones in this case study. After all, what application management tasks do you know that take 18 months of calendar effort? None. We can generate these savings because our focus is in enabling the creation of enterprise application architectures.

To me, it’s a glimpse of where the entire PaaS market needs to go if it plans on being an instrumental layer in the success of the customer. A DevOps only focus for PaaS knee caps the potential of the entire cloud market. Getting customers like this into production with value that enables them to build next generation architectures is the key to success, and we’re proud to have a customer base that exemplifies this statement.