Apprenda adds Java as a second language, will ‘support 90%’ of enterprise PaaS needs

Private platform-as-a-service provider Apprenda is one the strangest players in the quickly growing PaaS space. Not only is the company headquartered in Albany, N.Y., but to date it has only supported one language — .NET — while other PaaS vendors tout support for many.

Apprenda’s big sell is that it’s specifically looking to help developers in the enterprise. Devs that are working for banks, insurance companies, and health care organizations have a lot of constraints and compliance hoops they must jump through, but Apprenda wants to be there to speed up the amount of time it takes to develop and deploy an app. Until now, it has only served developers building .NET apps.

But today, Apprenda is finally jumping in with a second language by supporting Java. In doing so, the company claims it will support “90 percent” of enterprise app development that would be in use on a PaaS.

“Ninety percent of the app portfolio in the enterprise is .NET and Java,” Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller told VentureBeat. “It’s not the languages you support, it’s the depth of support it offers you.”

Apprenda sets itself apart from other big-name PaaS providers like Salesforce’s Heroku and Google App Engine, because its software runs in the private cloud while most of the other big dogs are in the public cloud. Since companies like banks and health care providers almost always want to use private cloud solutions, this gives Apprenda access to the huge IT spend that comes from enterprises.

Schuller says the only real competition Apprenda has is VMWare’s Cloud Foundry. But he says Cloud Foundry has alienated some in the PaaS ecosystem by offering a service that competes with key technology partners.

Apprenda is also using today to announce a huge new customer — JP Morgan Chase. Apprenda’s software is being used by JPMorgan to host and get better control over 2,000 apps, creating what it claims is the “largest private PaaS in the world.” That’s a pretty hefty achievement for the PaaS sector.

Schuller also noted that “nine out of 20” of the biggest banks in the world are running or testing Apprenda.

Apprenda has “dozens” of customers including Diebold and Symantec and has 42 employees. It has raised $15 million in funding to date from Ignition Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and High Peaks Venture Partners. The company has a second office in New York City, and it plans to eventually expand into Europe.

Check out a video outlining Apprenda’s core features below.

Sinclair Schuller via Apprenda