Microsoft and Apprenda Tighten Up Their PaaS Pact

Apprenda has always been a great ally in Microsoft’s Azure cloud push. The company has long offered a private .NET-focused Platform as a Service that formed a nice on-premises counterpart to Microsoft-hosted Azure.

That’s great for big companies — like Boeing, Diebold, JPMorgan Chase and McKesson — that “get” the promise of a platform-as-a-service that will keep in-house developers productive. Such companies tend to balk at the notion of putting that PaaS in a public cloud, though. Apprenda solves that problem nicely because it runs in-house.

Now Apprenda and Microsoft have tightened their ties. While they were partners before, they now offer a joint solution so that a customer who licenses Apprenda will automatically get Azure cloud access at no additional cost. That means they can deploy a full hybrid PaaS that bridges their own data center and Azure on day one, said Jesse Kliza, senior director of marketing for Clifton Park, N.Y.-based Apprenda.

To me, it seems that Microsoft gets a good deal here — a chance to convince some of those public-PaaS skeptics that Azure really isn’t that scary a place. And I should mention here that Apprenda isn’t tied to Microsoft .NET anymore. Last year it added Java support to its private PaaS. If you look at the corporate landscape, when it comes to internal applications, Java and Microsoft still rule.