Apprenda has $24 million in fresh funding to keep pushing its software development platform to big companies. Apprenda’s offering, dubbed a Platform as a Service, or PaaS, promises an easier way for developers to spec out, design, test and ultimately deploy software.
Safeguard Scientifics(SFE) already an Apprenda backer, led this round which also included contributions from New Enterprise Associates and Ignition partners. Total funding now stands at about $56 million.
Apprenda, Troy, N.Y., positions its platform as a way for companies to extend existing legacy applications in the cloud era, and also give them a way to build new cloud software. Red Hat(RHT) and Pivotal also field entries in this category.
“Every company on earth is becoming a software company that requires brutal speed in building apps, but everything that legacy IT vendors have sold them in the past works against that vision,” Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller said via email.
“We raised capital to build more support for traditional IT middleware so we can help the Global 2000 organize the chaos created by their IT stack and help their developers be more productive.”
The advent of containers, which let developers package up applications with the resources needed to run them, is seen by some as an alternative to full-fledged platforms as a service, a contention that Schuller dismissed.
While containers offer deployment value and can run applications side by side but in Schuller’s view they cannot securely run complex, multi-tier apps in the policy-driven manner required by enterprises. He sees containers replacing virtual machines as basic building blocks of infrastructure but companies need more to meet software development challenges.
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