PaaS Is The Future Of Cloud Services: Engine Yard Acquires Orchestra

Image via CrunchBase

I am sure regular readers of this blog are convinced that PaaS is the future of Cloud Services. We are seeing this trend happening now with so much action on the PaaS front. Today Engine Yard (previousCloudAve coverage) reacted to the market trend and announced the acquisition of Orchestra, the Irish PHP PaaS company. With this move, Engine Yard is moving beyond Ruby on Rails platforms and joins their peers like Heroku in supporting multiple languages. After CloudFoundry disrupted the PaaS space with its multi-language, multi-framework, multi-cloud platform, there is tremendous pressure on the hosted PaaS players to diversify and support more languages. Heroku recently announced that they are moving towards a polygot platform to support modern day developers. Clearly, this added tremendous pressure on Engine Yard to respond and Orchestra acquisition is their response.

I came across Orchestra few months back with a brief interaction with Eamon Leonard on their platform. They are a PHP PaaS platform taking on PHPFog (now renamed as AppFog). They made it easy for PHP to developers to run their applications without worrying about managing or scaling the applications. Their platform is running on top of AWS like many of the other hosted PaaS players. The team behind Orchestra was deeply participating in the PHP community with contributions to PEAR (Pyrus), PEAR2, CakePHP, etc.. Orchestra platform uses Nginx web server and supports git and subversion.

From the Engine Yard perspective, this is a necessary move. After being one of the pioneers of PaaS, they have lost the buzz (though they were steadily getting customers from web 2.0 to enterprise) to newcomers. With the advent of multi-language platforms, the single trick pony strategy was seen as a losing strategy. If you noticed this video I made during OSCON, Derek Collison of CloudFoundry gave hints regarding PHP and Python support. Their aggressive strategy clearly upped the competition in the space and this acquisition is a way Engine Yard can stay competitive. Even though it is too early to say if Engine Yard can really benefit from this acquisition, I think it is a necessary one. We will soon see how this plays out. Don’t be surprised if you see more acquisitions in this space because this space is really hot.

Related articles

• Engine Yard and Orchestra Join Forces (engineyard.com)
• Engine Yard goes PHP with Orchestra acquisition (gigaom.com)
• Engine Yard Acquires Orchestra To Add PHP Support To Its PaaS (techcrunch.com)
• Orchestra.io bought by EngineYard (orchestra.io)