Savvis Acquires AppFog To Offer Multi-Cloud PaaS

Savvis late last week said it has acquired AppFog, a startup focused on providing application orchestration on multiple Platform as a Service (PaaS) clouds. Terms were not disclosed.

The PaaS orchestration software from AppFog is based on VMware's Cloud Foundry platform and is designed to let organizations move applications among multiple cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft via Windows Azure.

Savvis' acquisition of AppFog comes on the heels of Dell snapping up Enstratius last month. While Enstratius and its key rival RightScale provide multi-cloud orchestration at the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) layer, AppFog does it for PaaS-based clouds. "Because it's PaaS, the ability to move an application from one cloud to another or one region to another is a whole lot easier from an infrastructure point of view," said Matt Leonard, Savvis' senior director of enterprise development services.

One of the company's first priorities, of course, is to add Savvis to the roster of cloud service providers AppFog can run on, Leonard said. While it's attractive in that it eases the movement of apps and workloads from other cloud providers to Savvis, I was wondering what incentive the company would have in making it easy to move workloads off its cloud and onto others such as Amazon's or Windows Azure?

Leonard said AppFog will make it more appealing to use the Savvis cloud to run applications and take advantage of managed security environments while having the flexibility to move between regions and cloud providers.

"If we can leverage the multi-cloud capability of AppFog and make it easier for developers to use not only IaaS but IaaS plus PaaS in different scenarios, that's good for us. It gets people using the AppFog software," Leonard said. "And then over time we may have certain features and capabilities that may only be available to customers that may be running their applications on the Savvis IaaS cloud on AppFog. It may not be a business decision. It may be a technical implementation decision. Over time, though, we may have differentiated service capabilities that offer incentives for customers to move off IaaS clouds and use Savvis on the AppFog platform because of those differentiated capabilities."

AppFog customers will no doubt watch closely to see if they can move their applications and workloads between different cloud providers.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 06/20/2013 at 12:49 PM