CenturyLink, the third largest telecom provider in the United States and provider of fiber networks to businesses around the world, has acquired AppFog, a Portland, Ore.-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) startup that prides itself on deploying more than 150,000 applications for more than 100,000 developers across multiple cloud environments.
The AppFog offering will be made available through CenturyLink's Savvis organization and listed in the Savvis cloud product catalog. Savvis, a data center operator delivering cloud, collocation, and managed-hosting services, was itself acquired by CenturyLink some two years earlier.
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The acquisition of AppFog follows closely on the heels of Dell's acquisition of Enstratius last month. While Enstratius and one of its key competitors, RightScale, provide multicloud orchestration at the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) layer, AppFog instead has chosen to focus its attention on the developer side of the equation by providing a similar solution for a PaaS-based cloud environment.
"AppFog leads the way in platform-as-a-service capabilities and continues to see strong adoption in the developer community," said Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink's Savvis organization. "Combining AppFog's market-leading platform-as-a-service capabilities with Savvis's industry-leading infrastructure-as-a-service cloud services and CenturyLink's global network will enable developers to securely and reliably operate and connect the applications they build and deploy."
AppFog will extend the Savvis Cloud Ecosystem beyond IaaS tools and software-as-a-service (SaaS) to now include PaaS add-ons for enhanced services and features.
According to the company, the AppFog platform is very much oriented toward improving the needs of software developers in terms of user experience, ease of use, and customizability. The solution currently supports a wide variety of programming languages, a list that includes Java, Node, PHP, Python, and Ruby. The platform also enables developers to choose which cloud infrastructure type they want to use, be it a private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, or some variation of the three.