CloudBees Builds PaaS With FoxWeave Acquisition

With the platform-as-a-service market heating up, CloudBees, maker of a popular Java PaaS, announced the acquisition of FoxWeave, a provider of cloud-based data integration services.

The acquisition brings native data migration and synchronisation services to the CloudBees Platform and simplifies the way developers can compose services and weave them together with PaaS-hosted application logic – or what CloudBees calls app-centric integration, according to CloudBees officials.

Independent growth

The acquisition signals the company’s intent to independently grow by adding key technology to the platform – offering native support for data migration, sync and cloud service integrations.

“Every business today has more than the traditional set of on-premise data stores,” said Sacha Labourey, chief executive of CloudBees, in a statement. “Businesses are also connected with a fast growing number of critical SaaS services, too. Moving and synchronising data between these services using a growing set of APIs is an ongoing chore – a really vexing problem that has to be solved. With FoxWeave, CloudBees now offers a service that makes integrations easy to set up and maintain. Not only can users quickly integrate these services’ data streams and applications, but developers can easily incorporate them into applications. This is what the coupling of the FoxWeave service and the CloudBees PaaS enables – and this capability is absolutely unique in the market today.”

Labourey said applications today are increasingly part of the “subscription economy”, making use of data from many sources and interacting with hosted services. This is particularly true of new applications being built in the cloud. Connecting to many data sources and services, migrating and mapping data between them, and keeping systems in sync are ongoing sources of pain that the FoxWeave technology relieves, often without having to write any code. The acquisition of FoxWeave establishes CloudBees as the first PaaS vendor to offer native facilities for service and data integration, further upping the game on the time-to-market advantage of PaaS and bringing an app-centric integration view to developers.

Olery, an Amsterdam-based provider of tools that provide insight into online reputation and social media presence for the leisure and hospitality industry, uses FoxWeave and is pleased with its functionality.

“Our sales and marketing team is using the FoxWeave service to synchronise certain transactions between Salesforce.com, Gmail, Unbounce and Wufoo,” said Wilco van Duinkerken, CTO of Olery, in a statement. “To have our internal users create a bunch of point integrations without a common tool or service is a recipe for a maintenance nightmare. Using FoxWeave as the service that ties it all together, the integrations are centralised in one place and easily maintained by the Olery sales and marketing team. From their standpoint, it just works. And from IT’s standpoint, we are able to focus on enhancing and improving the Olery service for Olery customers – not on internal integration issues. That’s where our priorities need to be.”

Hosted services

The combination of FoxWeave and the CloudBees PaaS enables developers to manage connections and data transfer between more than 20 hosted services, including Salesforce, Zoura, Zendesk, SendGrid, MySQL DB and Cloudant. Users also can run data migration and synchronisation tasks in the cloud, on CloudBees or on-premises, and achieve app-centric integration by mashing up application logic and service integrations into an integrated system. Moreover, users can build their own custom connectors, typically with no programming involved, the company said.

“APIs are driving a new economy and a new wave of innovation,” said Tom Fennelly, founder and chief executive of FoxWeave. “With FoxWeave, CloudBees is going to make it easier for PaaS application developers to consume these APIs in intuitive and maintainable ways. As CloudBees customers build and run new versions of their applications, being able to easily mesh data synchronisation and migration with their applications certainly will give them a new competitive advantage.”

Earlier this month, CloudBees announced the general availability of the CloudBees Eclipse Toolkit 2.0. The new version is a major upgrade of the CloudBees plug-in that helps developers create and develop software faster by bringing the power of the CloudBees PaaS to Eclipse.

The CloudBees Eclipse Toolkit now provides direct access to the CloudBees ClickStart application templates, accessed directly from within the Eclipse environment. ClickStarts set up the entire development-to-deployment environment for an application in one click. With the CloudBees Eclipse Toolkit, developers can quickly and easily try out a growing list of technology stacks on the CloudBees Platform – everything from Java EE 6 and Java EE 7 to GlassFish 3 and 4 to Scala and the Play Framework, as well as a host of other web technologies.

The previous version of the CloudBees Eclipse Toolkit enabled deployed applications and Jenkins jobs to be viewed from within Eclipse. The updated CloudBees Eclipse Toolkit also automatically sets up source repositories, databases and continuous integration environments in the cloud and provides the ability to deploy applications to the cloud – all from within Eclipse and in one click.

CloudBees also provides support for existing project types such as Dynamic Web, Maven and Ant, enabling developers to deploy these projects from Eclipse to the CloudBees Platform.

Reducing time to market

“Developers face enough challenges trying to develop code and manage the multiple steps in the build-test-deploy process,” said Harpreet Singh, senior director of product management at CloudBees, in a statement. “Using the new, enhanced version of the CloudBees Eclipse Toolkit, developers can easily access cloud resources to manage their projects end to end, without ever leaving the Eclipse environment. This helps developers accomplish their most important goal: writing high-quality code and getting it to market fast.”

Last month, demonstrating the popularity of its platform and the growth of its developer community, CloudBees announced that 18 new partners joined the CloudBees Partner Ecosystem. New partners include Technology Partners, providing add-on functionality for developers using the CloudBees Platform, and new services partners who provide expert professional services. The CloudBees ecosystem is more than 60 partners strong.

“With the help of partners, we are accelerating application development and deployment,” said Andrew Lee, vice president of business development at CloudBees. “Our Partner Ecosystem is bringing more value to software development teams that need best-of-breed services for software delivery and also to organisations that need a trusted services partner to help craft and implement their solutions.”

Do you know all about public sector IT – the triumph and the tragedy? Take our quiz!

Originally published on eWeek.