The 20 Coolest Cloud Platform Vendors Of The 2019 Cloud 100
Pioneering Platform
As businesses struggle to accelerate customer-facing and internal application development projects to eke out a competitive advantage, coming to their aid is a new breed of cloud-based platforms easing web and mobile application development, workflow customization, data management, business process management, analytics, and integration of heterogenous systems.
These platforms abstract users from complex underlying infrastructure, allowing them to focus on writing code—or in many cases to take an entirely no-code approach to application development.
AgilePoint
Jesse Shiah, Co-founder and CEO
Originally focused on the Microsoft ecosystem, AgilePoint has introduced multi-cloud support in its move upmarket. Enterprises now rely on the AgilePoint NX development platform to implement business process management solutions. Advanced developers can extend those drag-and-drop apps. The platform added the AgilePoint App Store to foster a larger digital ecosystem.
Caspio
Frank Zamani, CEO
Caspio enables a low-code approach for creating web forms and applications that require scalable and secure database functionality. The company's platform, which runs more than a half-million applications around the world, makes it easy to provision a fully managed database through a web-based interface.
Engine Yard
Andy Tryba, CEO
Engine Yard refocused on its Ruby on Rails roots after its acquisition in 2017 by Crossover, a company that assembles development teams adept at that same web-application development framework. With Crossover, it's now a one-stop shop for development professionals building AWS-hosted apps with DevOps practices.
Jelastic
Ruslan Synytsky, CEO
Jelastic is popular among Java developers, but the scalable platform with integrated container functionality has been extended in recent years to support many languages and database solutions. The Jelastic Cloud Platform simplifies deployment of legacy and cloud-native apps in Docker containers across public clouds.
Kintone
Dave Landa, CEO
Kintone, a subsidiary of Japanese productivity software developer Cybozu, streamlines development projects with a low-code platform designed to enable collaboration. The platform delivers application development tools for nontechnical users, including a library of templates to start from. Users can add plug-ins and push their apps to mobile and web platforms.
Kony
Thomas Hogan, CEO
Many large enterprises rely on Kony AppPlatform to rapidly build mobile apps using reusable components and collaboration tools. A recent upgrade added support for Progressive Web Apps—applications that deliver a mobile experience on traditional web pages with features like offline functionality, push notifications, and device hardware access.
Mendix
Derek Roos, CEO
The Mendix development platform offers a popular environment for visual modeling of full-stack applications by leveraging reusable building blocks. Mendix has been looking to pioneer incorporating artificial intelligence into the low-code development process—last year the company debuted Mendix Assist, which introduced AI-assisted application development.
Morpheus
Jeff Drazan, CEO
Born inside a Silicon Valley private equity firm, Morpheus Data spun out as a cloud management vendor with a platform geared to meet the needs of developers embracing DevOps processes. With one-click provisioning, database management, workload migration and automatic monitoring, Morpheus' platform enables adoption of Platform-as-a-Service technologies for application modernization projects.
Oracle
Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, Co-CEOs
The software giant now laser-focused on cloud sees PaaS as a crucial component of that strategy. Oracle Cloud Platform, optimized for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, combines Oracle's database, analytics and middleware services with open-source technologies to enable developers to build, deploy, integrate and secure their enterprise applications.
OutSystems
Paulo Rosado, CEO
OutSystems, a pioneer in the low-code market, has been on a tear in winning large enterprise customers looking to replace their legacy systems. The platform has been expanded to support development of a wide range of custom business solutions, including customer experience applications that can be infused with AI.
Pegasystems
Alan Trefler, CEO
The veteran software company specializing in customer relationship and business process automation solutions offers Pega Platform, a no-code app development toolkit with an open architecture. The platform includes a design language, authoring tools and a user experience framework to empower nontechnical business users to customize contextual experiences across channels.
Pivotal CF
Rob Mee, CEO
Pivotal is still the leading force in delivering Cloud Foundry technology—the industry standard for PaaS—to large enterprises. With an IPO last year delivering a $3.9 billion valuation, the company spun out of EMC and VMware six years ago has been aggressively promoting adoption of Pivotal Cloud Foundry across the Fortune 100.
Platform.sh
Fred Plais, CEO
Platform.sh promotes what it calls a NoOps model for web platform services. The technology, largely adopted by e-commerce and media sites, facilitates developer workflows and eases deployments with managed hosting. New application features and fixes can be tested in isolation on production sites, with production data.
Plesk
Nils Hueneke, CEO
The Swiss software company offers a popular cloud platform for hosting web applications. Plesk supports web developers with a package of administrative tools and an extensible control panel. The WebOps platform, used by enterprises to automate millions of website and mail boxes, is agnostic to operating systems.
Red Hat
James Whitehurst, CEO
OpenShift became a leading solution in the container management arena after the Red Hat development platform pivoted to an architecture reliant on the Kubernetes container orchestrator. The latest release made OpenShift more viable for smaller customers with added functionality like graphical interface tools, integrated monitoring and greater dashboard visibility.
Salesforce
Marc Benioff, CEO
Salesforce has been heavily focused on advancing the low-code capabilities of its Lightning environment, especially for developers building mobile enterprise apps. At the same time, the CRM leader has maintained a leading market position for Heroku, the groundbreaking PaaS environment.
SAP
Bill McDermott, CEO
SAP Cloud Platform is a comprehensive solution for enterprises looking to extend, integrate and build secure business applications. It offers mobile, big data, machine learning, and IoT capabilities. SAP recently introduced a "private edition" of the platform, as well as started providing free licenses to channel partners developing and demonstrating solutions.
ServiceNow
John Donahoe, CEO
ServiceNow's Now Platform is a solution often chosen by enterprises looking to digitize their workflows with custom apps. The platform has been adding data processing, machine learning and predictive analytics capabilities, and now will benefit from the natural language query technology gained in ServiceNow's acquisition of FriendlyData.
Software AG
Sanjay Brahmawar, CEO
Software AG's webMethods AgileApps Platform enables rapid development of web-based productivity apps supported by real-time analytics and reporting across devices. The German company's service is popular with business and subject-matter experts from small and midsize customers who prefer models and templates to visually customize applications and processes.
Zoho
Sridhar Vembu, CEO
Zoho Creator remains a go-to solution for no-code application development complemented by the vendor's suite of cloud-based business apps. Creator offers drag-and-drop functionality for automating business processes, managing data, and deploying custom applications. Non-programmers can rapidly assemble applications, automate their workflows, and generate custom reports.