It happened a little quicker than we thought, but AppFog and its Platform-as-a-Service will be part of CenturyLink’s Savvis cloud lineup.
Terms of the acquisition, first reported by GigaOM, were not disclosed, but in a statement, CenturyLink said the AppFog public PaaS will be offered via its savvisdirect online catalog that offers an array of hosted services. Savvis will also offer private, dedicated AppFog deployments to big customers.
AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson (pictured above) is now vice president, cloud evangelist for Savvis.
This acquisition is part of a bigger trend in which PaaS providers are trying to sell big companies on this model to develop and deploy their custom corporate applications but traction has been limited.
Software-as-a-Service took off as Salesforce.com provided a strong argument for moving all the capex spending from on-premises CRM and salesforce automation applications to a subscription model that is paid out of operational expenses. Infrastructure-as-a-service took developers by storm when they saw they could bypass IT to spin up and down development sandboxes cheaply as needed. But many big companies still want their corporate apps to run in- house, even if they’re developed outside.
But lots of vendors continue to push the corporate PaaS case. Red Hat just made its OpenShift PaaS generally available and Pivotal launched a re-architected Cloud Foundry V.2 as a paid-only service. Some expect that other hosting providers, all of which are trying to build credibility with cloud services, will follow CenturyLink/Savvis footsteps and buy up remaining independent public PaaS providers.
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