The 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors Of The 2018 Cloud 100

Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors For 2018

Digital transformation has gone from a lofty buzzword to a business imperative. Businesses large and small realize they need to move fast in empowering their workforces with unique productivity tools and delivering custom services and experiences to their customers over the Internet. If they don’t transform their application environment, they risk being overtaken by competitors that do.

To meet the demands for agility and speed, innovative vendors are offering cloud platforms that accelerate the development of applications, workflows and processes, data integration projects and advanced analytics capabilities.

Those platforms allow enterprises to build robust apps without having to find skilled programmers, integration experts or data scientists. They also facilitate deployment and management of those custom capabilities without much concern about the underlying infrastructure and security.

1010data

Sandy Steier, CEO

Headquarters: New York

1010data was one of the first software companies to take big data processing into the cloud. Its portfolio includes data acquisition and management, analytics, visualization and monetization services, as well as QuickApps, a platform geared for non-programmers looking to develop and deploy custom analytics applications.

AgilePoint

Jesse Shiah, CEO

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

AgilePoint started as a SharePoint workflow add-on for small and midsize enterprises. But the company shifted its product focus in recent years and now offers a general-purpose low-code platform with its technological roots in the Microsoft ecosystem. As part of that transformation, AgilePoint has moved upmarket, winning some large enterprise customers.

Appian

Matt Calkins, CEO

Headquarters: Reston, Va.

Last year, Appian became the first low-code development platform vendor to have an initial public offering. The company went public after a decade-long evolution that saw its product portfolio evolve from portals, to business process management tools, to the current low-code development platform.

Bizagi

Gustavo Gomez, CEO

Headquarters: Amersham, U.K.

Once strictly a business process automation vendor, Bizagi now offers a low-code application development platform in addition to its process and case management tools. The U.K.-based vendor is rapidly expanding sales and support around the world as it completes its transformation.

Databricks

Ali Ghodsi, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

Databricks recently completed a massive financing round that will fund further industry-specific development of its Spark-based Unified Analytics Platform. Founded by the U.C. Berkeley team that created the Spark data processing engine, Databricks’ platform is popular with data scientists tackling large-scale analytics and artificial intelligence problems.

Jelastic

Ruslan Synytsky, CEO

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

Jelastic made a name for itself with a highly scalable platform for deploying applications written in Java. The product now spans several popular languages, database solutions, and facilitates deploying monolithic legacy applications as well as cloud-native ones implemented with Docker containers. The company coined the term ’Platform-as-Infrastructure.’

K2

Evan Ellis, CEO

Headquarters: Seattle

K2 has strong credentials when it comes to delivering a low-code platform for implementing business process automation through integrated workflows. Mobile and web interface design capabilities complement the platform’s robust data management, reporting and analysis features. Security and governance control is embedded throughout the development process.

Kony

Thomas Hogan, Chairman, CEO

Headquarters: Austin, Texas

Kony offers enterprises a powerful integrated development platform for creating mobile apps. The Kony Visualizer brings together tools for native design, native prototyping, development and deployment. The low-code platform uses JavaScript and includes back-end services, as well as an omnichannel engine for mobile and web delivery.

Mendix

Derek Roos, CEO

Headquarters: Boston

The Mendix development platform became popular by offering visual modeling of full-stack applications and reusable building blocks. A recent decision to base its environment on Cloud Foundry helped seal a major deal with SAP, a distributor of the popular Platform-as-a-Service. Mendix also offers leading artificial intelligence and machine-learning development features.

OutSystems

Paulo Rosado, CEO

Headquarters: Portugal

This software company based in Portugal was a pioneer in the low-code market. Now OutSystems has expanded its platform to facilitate development of new types of business applications, including those incorporating sensor and real-time data, and artificial intelligence. The company also is supporting a wider range of business application use cases.

Pivotal

Rob Mee, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

Five years since its spin-out from EMC and VMware, Pivotal’s development platform is a staple across the enterprise landscape. A channel program launched in 2016 took root last year, shifting more Pivotal Cloud Foundry business to systems integrators capable of extending engagements across the enterprise.

Progress Software

Yogesh Gupta, CEO

Headquarters: Bedford, Mass.

Last year, Progress paid $49 million to acquire Kinvey, a mobile Backend-as-a-Service platform used by developers to build and run mobile apps that integrate with enterprise systems. The acquisition bolstered a strategic plan around cognitive application development as Progress jumps into the digital transformation arena with new software development tools.

Qubole

Ashish Thusoo, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

Qubole Data Service is a self-managing, self-optimizing platform for processing big data. The Hadoop-based service offers a unified interface that helps users analyze data stored across public clouds, including AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. The comprehensive platform learns as it is used.

Red Hat

Jim Whitehurst, CEO

Headquarters: Raleigh, N.C.

The open-source leader’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service delivers to enterprises cloud-native application development and deployment. OpenShift is a container-based PaaS that leverages Kubernetes for orchestration. The latest release introduced native integrations empowering developers to connect to AWS services, supplying a consistent and open foundation for hybrid application development.

Salesforce

Marc Benioff, CEO

Headquarters: San Francisco

While the multiplicity of Salesforce development platforms—Force.com, Heroku and Lightning—has confused customers in the past, the CRM leader is now closer than ever before to offering a unified developer experience. Salesforce has integrated Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud applications across its development platforms, including the Lightning Experience and ecosystem.

SAP

Bill McDermott, CEO

Headquarters: Walldorf, Germany

SAP Cloud Platform provides comprehensive development capabilities to help extend, integrate and build secure business applications. Cloud Platform delivers in-memory capabilities and unique business services for accelerating digital transformation projects. The open platform integrates mobile, big data, machine learning and IoT capabilities.

ServiceNow

John Donahoe, CEO

Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.

The Now Platform has implemented functionality that has made ServiceNow a more attractive supplier of a low-code development platform to its large existing base of enterprise customers. ServiceNow’s offering is particularly well-suited for building IoT applications, and is gaining capabilities across real-time data processing, predictive analytics and machine learning.

SnapLogic

Gaurav Dhillon, CEO

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

SnapLogic offers a portfolio of highly scalable data and application integration products. The Integration Platform-as-a-Service is built for drag-and-drop orchestration when connecting enterprise applications with on-premises and cloud-based data, making integration easy for those without coding skills. It also enables the infusion of machine learning to empower decision-makers with predictive functionality.

Software AG

Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO

Headquarters: Darmstadt, Germany

Software AG’s business process management platform provides tools to nontechnical users looking to design and deploy their own applications. The company’s webMethods AgileApps Platform, available as a cloud service, is popular with small and midsize companies that prefer to leverage models and templates for application development.

Zoho

Sridhar Vembu, CEO

Headquarters: Pleasanton, Calif.

Zoho complements a suite of cloud-based business apps with Zoho Creator, a platform for automating business processes, managing data and deploying custom applications. Creator enables non-programmers to rapidly assemble applications, automate their workflows, and generate custom reports. The platform can extend those apps to mobile devices.