HP is growing its cloud offering with the acquisition of the Stackato Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) business from ActiveState. Financial terms of the deal are are not being publicly disclosed at this time.
What’s somewhat confusing is the fact that HP already has its own PaaS services, which like Stackato – are based on the open-source Cloud Foundry platform. So for now, HP will have two separate PaaS offerings. It’s not clear if the two will remain separate for long, or if HP will integrate the two PaaS platforms.
It all will likely add to the continued confusion of HP’s cloud messaging in my opinion. The company is a huge backer of OpenStack, yet it bought Eucalyptus which is all about Amazon compatibility.
Ok that’s about user choice and options.
But two PaaS platforms?
Let’s step back a few years here. HP and ActiveState are hardly strangers. In December of 2012 HP announced its first attempt at PaaS with – you guess it – ActiveState Stackato as the core technology. At that time, HP’s cloud wasn’t called Helion but was called the HP CloudSystem.
The Stackato technology is even older, dating back to 2011, when ActiveState first announced the platform.
Stackato is a relatively mature CloudFoundry PaaS and it’s one that HP understands well. It makes sense that HP is bringing it into the fold to enhance capabilities. The only question for end users will be whether or not Stackato adds more cloud confusion or reduces it, but making a new and easier on ramp to cloud application development and deployment.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist