BOSTON, December 13, 2010 -- CloudBees, the innovation leader in Java Cloud computing, today announced it has acquired Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) pioneer Stax Networks. The acquisition will accelerate the delivery of CloudBees’ own Java PaaS, RUN@cloud, which complements the company’s DEV@cloud service. With the two offerings, CloudBees will be the first company to offer a fully integrated, development to production solution for the cloud environment.

Sacha Labourey, founder and CEO of CloudBees, and Spike Washburn, founder and CEO of Stax Networks, talk more about the acquisition in their own words in this video. Labourey and Washburn will also be hosting a webcast tomorrow, December 15 at 1:00 p.m. EST to detail the roadmap and answer questions.

News Highlights

PaaS is the software infrastructure needed to run applications in the cloud—in simplest terms, it is middleware for the cloud. The CloudBees team, led by Labourey, former CTO of JBoss, has deep middleware roots, and is comprised of engineers from JBoss and the GlassFish team at Sun Microsystems. With Stax, led by Washburn, a founding member of the WebSphere team and later the JRun team at Allaire/Macromedia, this middleware pedigree now extends to IBM and Macromedia as well. With this collective experience behind it, CloudBees is well positioned for this new era of cloud middleware.

Founded in 2007 by Washburn with funding from JJ Allaire, Stax Networks released the industry’s first full-featured Java application platform for the cloud. To date, over 3,000 applications have been deployed on Stax.
The Stax platform will be integrated with existing CloudBees technology to create RUN@cloud, a cloud-native platform for deploying and running applications quickly and easily in the cloud. Developers can use the CloudBees DEV@cloud build system to develop, build and test their code – then publish directly to the cloud using RUN@cloud. With these two services, CloudBees lets customers handle their entire application lifecycle in the cloud, from development to deployment.

The integrated RUN@cloud service will be available in January. Customers can deploy their applications to RUN@cloud, with no need to worry about IT matters such as servers, virtual machines, clustering or scaling. CloudBees handles the operations seamlessly; developers just focus on their applications.

DEV@cloud is currently in beta with over 300 customers. A key feature of DEV@cloud is Hudson, the popular open source continuous integration server, available as a cloud service. More than 300,000 Hudson build minutes have been logged on DEV@cloud. The service is expected to be generally available in January under a monthly subscription plan.

Supporting Quotes

Sacha Labourey, founder and CEO of CloudBees: “If the recent flurry of acquisitions is anything to go by, PaaS is shaping up to be a contested field in 2011. The Stax cloud application platform enables CloudBees to get a jumpstart on everyone and accelerate our RUN@cloud service to the market. CloudBees is focused on bringing simplicity and ease-of-use back to Java developers with a cloud-native environment that eliminates IT operational headaches. The Stax team has built an incredible offering well ahead of its time that will take us one step closer to our vision.”

Spike Washburn, founder and CEO of Stax Networks: “CloudBees and Stax share a common vision for the cloud – namely that the focus has to be on applications, not servers or virtual machines. By combining forces, we will now have a complete application lifecycle offering for the cloud. I’m looking forward to joining a crack team with the resources and track record to take the Stax platform, as RUN@cloud, to a wider audience.”

Charles Teague, CEO of Lose It!, a top-selling iPhone application: “Stax has made it straightforward for Lose It! to run a high volume, data intense website handling 5,000 requests per minute with very little operational overhead. Their technology and service has allowed us to focus on creating the best product we can. We're excited about the CloudBees merger, and what this could mean for our ability to put our development in the cloud.”

About CloudBees

CloudBees (http://cloudbees.com) is the only Java Cloud company focused on servicing the complete lifecycle of cloud application development and deployment – without any servers, any virtual machines or any IT staff. Founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite technology team, CloudBees is backed by Matrix Partners.

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Source: CloudBees