Abe Sultan Co-Founder & VP of Engineering For Apprenda

Private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor Apprenda Inc. has just added support for the popular JBoss and Apache Tomcat web servers, a move which translates to deeper support for more Java applications.

Apprenda began life as a simple Microsoft .NET-centric PaaS for enterprises, later adding Java support into the mix. It’s been pretty successful with large enterprise customers, especially financial organizations – high profile customers include firms like JPMorgan Chase, AmerisourceBergen and McKesson.

Now its latest version extends those Java capabilities, something Apprenda is positioning as a “multiple best of breed” strategy, reminding customers this is more than just a plugin with “lowest common denominator functionality”. It also seems to be gearing up for a fight with another PaaS vendor – Red Hat Inc’s OpenShift.

“Many of our customers are already enjoying the benefits of Apprenda with their .NET and Java Tomcat application portfolios,” said Apprenda in a statement. “These existing customers, as well as prospects evaluating PaaS, have been considering OpenShift to get coverage for their JBoss applications. With Apprenda 5.5, they can seamlessly incorporate those JBoss applications under a single umbrella without the need to integrate multiple solutions. Apprenda is the only enterprise PaaS providing deep coverage of JBoss, Tomcat and .NET applications.”

Other main contenders in the private PaaS arena include Salesforce.com’s two platforms – Force.com and Heroku – and the Pivotal CF implementation of Cloud Foundry. Private PaaS refers to those run on a company’s internal infrastructure or private cloud – in contrast to public PaaS, which runs on public infrastructure like Amazon Web Services’ cloud.

Apprenda 5.5 gives users a single dashboard from which they can manage both .Net and Java applications configured to run on JBoss servers. It also adds support for Oracle Java Management Extensions (JMX), which means developers will be able to monitor Java application instances too.

It’ll be interesting to see what lies ahead in the world of Paas more generally, especially with the advent of containerization technologies like Docker. Many pundits argue that containers, which let developers build an app just once then deploy it in multiple environments, do away with the need for a full-featured PaaS – though Apprenda, Pivotal CF, OpenShift and the rest are likely to disagree.

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