News

Java PaaS Firm CloudBees Acquires Data Integrator FoxWeave

• By John K. Waters
• July 24, 2013

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company CloudBees  today announced the acquisition of FoxWeave, a provider of a cloud-based data integration platform of the same name. With this acquisition, CloudBees adds native data migration and synchronization services to its evolving PaaS.

"CloudBees is about people building new applications and deploying and managing them in the cloud," explained Steve Harris, the company's SVP of Products. "When they want those applications to make use of data from other sources and hosted services -- Salesforce to manage customer relations or Zoura to bill usage of the service -- they access them through an API. FoxWeave simply makes that very easy to do."

Harris describes FoxWeave as "a bootstrap startup." The company was among half a dozen to join CloudBees' partner ecosystem last year, one of the first "verified solution" partners. The company's founder, Tom Fennelly, will service as tech lead on integration services at the company.

"APIs are driving a new economy and a new wave of innovation," Fennelly said in a statement. "With FoxWeave, CloudBees is going to make it easier for PaaS application developers to consume these APIs in intuitive and maintainable ways."

This integration capability is key to what is being called "application-centric development," in which developers seek to weave data and services from other sources into their application logic. Bringing this integration capability to CloudBees users natively on the platform supports this trend, Harris said, and effectively combines two "as-a-Service" categories: Application-Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS), a category coined by Gartner and applied to CloudBees, and Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS). CloudBees founder Sacha Labourey describes this combination as "absolutely unique in the market today."

The FoxWeave acquisition will allow CloudBees users to manage connections and data transfer among more than 20 hosted services, the company says, including Salesforce, Zoura, Zendesk, SendGrid, MySQL DB, and Cloudant. The service allows users to run data migration and sync tasks in the cloud, on the CloudBees platform, or on-premise. It also allows developers to build their own custom connectors, typically, the company says, with no programming involved.

CloudBees is best known as one of the Java-based PaaS specialists. The Boston-based company's flagship 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. The CloudBees PaaS competes with Red Hat's OpenShift and Cloud Foundry, and Java-based middleware from Oracle and others.

The FoxWeave integration capabilities are available today. More information is available on the CloudBees Web site.