Canopy Launches New PaaS, Joins Cloud Foundry Foundation

Canopy, a joint venture of EMC, VMware and Atos, announced its Canopy Cloud Fabric, a new enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.

Canopy leverages the best of its three founding companies’ solutions with a one-stop shop for cloud services, including a consultancy. The company is focused on cloud delivery to large public and multinational private-sector organizations.

London-based Canopy introduced its new PaaS at the Cloud Foundry Summit in San Francisco this week. Canopy Cloud Fabric is a new cloud service that delivers Pivotal CF, Pivotal’s enterprise distribution of Cloud Foundry, as a service. It is supported and managed with enterprise service-level agreements (SLAs) and a range of choices over tenancy, geography, hosting and pricing models. Canopy further extends the Canopy Cloud Fabric solution with a comprehensive range of consulting, customization and developer services to support enterprises in their adoption of PaaS.

Canopy and Pivotal also announced that Canopy joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a Silver member, helping to create an open ecosystem to foster the growth and development of open enterprise PaaS.

Platform-as-a-service technology is critical to driving business innovation through software because it enables organizations to move from few large application updates per year to smaller updates delivered much more frequently, Canopy officials said.

“We’re operating in one of the most disruptive eras of IT in the last 25 years—an era of digital Darwinism where companies will be made or broken by their ability to adapt quickly to meet changing digital demands,” Darren Ratcliffe, senior vice president of PaaS at Canopy, said in a statement. He added that Canopy’s interest in the Cloud Foundry Foundation lies in helping organizations unlock the value of PaaS.

Canopy Cloud Fabric provides users with a choice of locations around the world to meet data locality requirements, as well as a choice of hosting arrangements—including the option to host your own dedicated private PaaS in your own data center. The company also offers a range of application services, including the option to host services locally to your application to remove network latency issues. Canopy also provides consulting, customization and developer services to customize the solution to meet the specific needs of your organization, the company said.

“Cloud, and specifically PaaS, is a critical piece in the digital puzzle, enabling organizations to rediscover software development that will shape product innovation,” Leo Spiegel, senior vice president of corporate development at Pivotal, said in a statement. “By joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation and basing Canopy Cloud Fabric on Pivotal CF, Canopy demonstrates a shared vision to promote and realize the benefits of PaaS for organizations who want to be digital leaders.”

Canopy is offering an early adopter program through which qualifying organizations can test-drive the Canopy Cloud Fabric service at no charge for a limited time.