Bart Copeland, CEO, ActiveState
Cloud may bring new possibilities to the IT industry in
terms of flexibility, cost benefit and efficiency, but the transition to cloud
can be painful for many companies. When it’s time for developers to move
mission critical apps to the cloud, enterprises can sometimes run into
trouble—they suddenly discover the apps won’t run on the company’s platform due
to conflicting language, framework or database barriers. To address these
obstacles, ActiveState, a Canadian software company headquartered in Vancouver,
was inspired to create its own private PaaS solution. ActiveState recently
launched Stackato 2.2 to bring customers the benefits of public cloud, with all
of the security and control of a private model.
ActiveState has been around since 1997. The company has
built a business of over 2 million customers, with a focus on three key
offerings for customers: selling development tool licenses, providing
enterprise grade support for Perl, Python and Tcl applications, and its latest offering,
which is in the cloud. “We do a few things extremely well,” said Bart Copeland,
ActiveState CEO, in an interview with IT in Canada. “First, we understand open-source
software; second, we understand developers; and third, we understand the
enterprise.” Roots in these key areas inspired ActiveState to follow what was
happening in the cloud computing space—specifically, the transition from
software-as-a-service (SaaS) to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and to
platform-as-a-service (PaaS). “We are not infrastructure guys, we are
application guys,” said Copeland. “We are very intrigued with PaaS; but the
problem with PaaS, as we saw it, was that it was very limited in terms of how
you could work with it, meaning it wasn't very flexible. And usually you had to
use it on someone else's cloud.”
