At the end of each year, I make it a point to think about what happened during the past year at a market and company level. During 2014, we spent a lot of time getting dirt under our fingernails, not necessarily acknowledging what we had accomplished or failed.

Now that 2014 is over, I look back and see true achievements for both Apprenda and the PaaS market. Rather than spending time focusing on specific wins and losses, let’s focus on categorical successes in 2014:

Customers

Customer success is the most important success. We’re in a market made up of highly scrutinizing buyers who are making strategic bets on cloud and PaaS. Our customers vote with their dollars and their commitment. The Apprenda team has done a fantastic job helping the Global 2000 understand why we’re the best choice for their PaaS strategy. Prior to 2014, we had the privilege of calling at least one of the top three Fortune 50 companies in healthcare, banking, and manufacturing a customer.

In 2014, not only did we secure customers across varied demographics, but we also earned the right to help one of the top three organizations in state government and accounting move into a PaaS-driven IT model. That means Apprenda now has the largest Fortune 50 customers across five verticals. Not only does this capture the magnitude of Apprenda’s success, but also shows that the PaaS market is maturing across the board.

Partners

You’re known by the company you keep. At Apprenda, we’ve always prided ourselves on the deep integration we have with top vendor technologies that are mainstays within IT. Although we’ve had these integrations for some time, it was important that we galvanize our partners around a common cause that we’re passionate about: giving customers freedom via a highly extensible architecture and business model.

To support that cause, we launched our partner program, the OneCloud Alliance. OneCloud is a commitment by Apprenda and its partners that we will always focus our energy on providing a highly extensible architecture that guarantees low risk and minimal lock-in for customers. Our 2014 launch of OneCloud—with partners like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Atos, and Oracle—made a clear statement to the market that Apprenda is the leader in integrating with the existing IT stack while delivering a future-state hybrid cloud.

Product

Without question, Apprenda is the most mature enterprise PaaS on the market. In 2014, we expanded our Java support to include JBoss alongside Tomcat. This makes us the only PaaS with credible support not only for multiple Java app servers, but also for Linux and Windows based applications. Just looking at these three categories, the amount of value created by the Apprenda team is astounding. I’m thankful and privileged to be CEO at a company of such amazing talent that outperforms companies many times our size. 2014 is a testament to the quality of the people at Apprenda.

Dedicating 2014

Sadly, the end of 2014 was also a mournful time for Apprenda employees. In December, we lost Ed Sprenger, a great colleague and friend. Ed was a senior developer who had the rare ability to share his tremendous IQ with the Apprenda team, while being able to communicate clearly and make everyone laugh—no matter the topic. His wit, intelligence, and kindness will be sorely missed. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family.  2014 at Apprenda is dedicated to Ed and the massively positive impact he has had on our product and culture.