HP acquires ActiveState’s Stackato PaaS business

HP today announced that it has agreed to buy the Stackato business from ActiveState. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Stackato is private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud software for building and deploying applications based on the open-source Cloud Foundry project. Companies can run Stackato on top of a public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services, or in their own on-premises data centers. Companies using Stackato include Capital One, Cisco, Colgate-Palmolive, and Mozilla.

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HP is putting Stackato inside its Helion portfolio of cloud tools. Eucalyptus, which HP bought last year as a way to run an Amazon-compatible private cloud in companies’ existing data centers, is also part of Helion, as is a distribution of the OpenStack open-source cloud software. HP has acknowledged that it can’t compete “head to head” with AWS in the public cloud market, so the legacy tech vendor is doubling down on its on-premises software selection.

The PaaS market has been the subject of many investments in acquisitions. Ericsson invested in PaaS company Apcera last year, Engine Yard bought OpDemand earlier this year, and Apprenda announced a $24 million round last week.

Today’s deal is coming before HP splits into two companies — HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Cloud tools such as Stackato will be part of the latter company.

The deal should close in the fourth quarter of HP’s 2015 fiscal year, which will end on Oct. 31, according to a statement.

ActiveState started in 1997 and is based in Vancouver. Aside from Stackato, the company sells distributions of programming languages and licenses for the Komodo integrated development environment.