CloudBees, a Deleware-based leader for Java cloud computing, announced $4 million in its first round of financing.  The round was led by Matrix Partners, with participation from individual investors, including JBoss founder Marc Fleury and Bob Bickel.

“The cloud represents a new opportunity for disruption, similar to what I saw with Enterprise Java 10 years ago. Just as JBoss provided a streamlined and useable alternative to BEA and IBM, CloudBees will be providing innovation and ease of use compared to VMware’s bloated cloud stacks,” said Fleury.

The investment will be used to finance the construction of a cloud-agnostic, cloud-native Java platform as a service (PaaS) covering development services and a production runtime for Java. This will enable Cloudbees to accelerate development and delivery of RUN@cloud, a production runtime designed to complement DEV@cloud to create the most comprehensive Java PaaS covering the entire application management life cycle, from development, through continuous integration and staging, to production and maintenance.

The company’s move in constructing this platform follows the acquisition of InfraDNA and the team participation of Kohsuke Kawaguichi, creator of Hudson continuous integration server. The acquisition boosts Hudson services relationship with Nectar, an on-premise solution.

CloudBees was founded by ex JBoss CTO Sacha Labourney. It went public August 2010 together with Dev@cloud, a fully integrated development infrastructure featuring a Hudson-based continuous integration offering delivered as a service.

“With Amazon and others having paved the way for cloud computing with affordable infrastructure resources, we see PaaS as the next cloud turf up for grabs. While we’ve already begun executing aggressively, this financing will help us
further fuel delivery and adoption of our PaaS. I am pleased that Matrix Marc, Bob and others have the confidence in our technology, strategy and first-rate technical team to provide us with capital to grow,” said Labourney.

In other Java news, Hadoop has been on top of its update pushes, while it’s causing legal problems for Google, as Android-powered devices face patent infringement from Oracle.