Apprenda offers free PaaS service for .NET customers

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) firm Apprenda is looking to expand its reach with a free service offering.

The company said its Apprenda Express platform would allow enterprises, developers and service providers to run a .NET cloud deployment of up to 12GB, free of charge. Apprenda hopes that the free release will allow companies to test the platform prior to deployment.

Sinclair Schuler, chief executive for Apprenda, told V3 that the company's PaaS service aimed to reduce the time needed to develop and deploy applications on the corporate network.

By providing a unified and hosted platform for all applications, tasks such as configuration and lifecycle management can be dramatically simplified.

"We said: 'what if we built a datacentre-wide operating system that provided services out of the box and could deal with workflows for lifecycle management?'," Schuler said.

"We built a technology layer that can take any number of servers and stitch them together."

As with many other PaaS vendors, Apprenda is looking to take a piece of the growing market for private and public cloud computing platforms. Among the vendors looking to enter the PaaS market are IT heavyweights IBM, VMware and Oracle.

Schuler, however, remains undeterred by the competition. He argued that businesses would seek out more agile platforms, which can adapt to both public and private cloud deployments rather than a single monolithic platform.

"The goal is to be turnkey," he explained.

"A big part of our motivation is that we don't believe the future of cloud is three big vendors. We see the opportunity for thousands of these clouds to exist."

Additionally, Schuler sees the line between public and private clouds blurring for many firms.

With security, performance and accessibility concerns still rampant, the Apprenda chief believes companies will look for private cloud deployments, while keeping their options open for a transition to the public cloud down the road.