News

Java PaaS Provider Expands Partner Ecosystem

• By John K. Waters
• December 12, 2012

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees is expanding its partner ecosystem with a new Services Partner Program, which offers new support for system integrators (SIs), Web designers and software development consultants. According to the company, the new program aims to give these service providers the tech and marketing know-how to provide application development, deployment and consulting using the CloudBees Platform.

CloudBees is probably best known as one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS. But CloudBees is also a big supporter of the open-source, Java-based Jenkins CI tool. Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who created the Hudson CI server and instigated the Jenkins fork, is an elite developer and architect at CloudBees. And the company contributed five plugins to the Jenkins community earlier this year. A growing list of its free and open source Jenkins plugins is available on the company's Web site.

The Boston-based CloudBees launched its partner ecosystem in mid-2011 in an effort to extend its platform to support other cloud services. The ecosystem was created to bring cloud-based services from partner companies directly to Java developers within the CloudBees platform.

"You have more and more development taking place in the cloud these days," company founder Sacha Labourey, a former JBoss CTO, told ADTmag at the time. "The partners coming into our ecosystem represent that trend pretty well, but also a lot of other things are going on in the cloud -- information tracking, data storage and integration, mobile backend services, log management. These new partners provide developers with access to even more platform-based services that help them build, test, and deploy Java applications in the cloud."

The company's platform comprises two products: DEV@cloud, a service designed to allow developers to take their build and test environments to the cloud, and RUN@cloud, a traditional deployment PaaS designed to allow dev teams to deploy their applications to production on the cloud. DEV@cloud comes with the open source continuous integration server, Jenkins, which recently forked from Hudson. The two products are available together and separately.

The new program will provide developer services on DEV@cloud; the deployment piece will be available via RUN@cloud. The program also offers a PaaS integrator partnership, which allows service providers to use the company's cloud resources for an initial Proof of Concept, and a "Jenkins Enterprise by CloudBees" reseller partnership, which supports reselling of the Jenkins plugin.

More information is available on the company Web site here.