Apprenda

Founding and operations

Apprenda was founded in 2007 in Clifton Park, New York, by Matt Ammerman, Sinclair Schuller, and Abraham Sultan. Schuller and Sultan both graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Ammerman graduated from University at Albany, SUNY. Schuller, the company's CEO, previously worked in IT, developing applications for large banks.

In June 2014, Apprenda moved from Clifton Park to Troy, New York, in part to be closer to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. With headquarters in New York rather than California, Forbes has called Apprenda "the anti-Silicon Valley startup." The company has a second office in New York City, with plans to eventually expand into Europe.

Services

Apprenda launched its cloud platform in 2007, supporting Microsoft's .NET Framework. The following year, Apprenda closed its public cloud service and began selling the software behind it so that companies could run it on their own private servers. In 2010, the company launched SaaSGrid Express, a free, downloadable SaaS application platform. In September 2012, the company introduced ApprendaCloud, a free public cloud platform providing a raw infrastructure where developers can experiment with creating mobile and cloud-based applications, before bringing them into Apprenda or their own in-house infrastructure. After previously only supporting .NET, in February 2013, Apprenda added Java as a second language, adding support for an estimated 90% of enterprise app development on PaaS. In 2014, Apprenda and Microsoft offered users access to the Microsoft Azure cloud system at no additional cost, so customers can deploy a PaaS that bridges their own data center and Azure. Beyond Azure, Apprenda's work with Microsoft extends to Windows Server, Team Foundation Server, Windows Azure Pack, SQL Server and Oracle enterprise databases.

Software

Apprenda's software is aimed primarily at developers working for organizations such as banks, insurance companies and healthcare providers, to build and manage new applications, and to move their existing applications to the cloud. Unlike other cloud platform providers, whose software runs in the public cloud, Apprenda's software runs in the private cloud. Due to privacy issues, companies like banks and healthcare providers generally prefer to use the private cloud. With partnerships from Apprenda's OneCloud Alliance aimed at ensuring interoperability and portability, companies can move their existing applications to either the public cloud (i.e. Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure), their own private cloud, or to a mixture of public and private. The technology is capable of shifting Java and .NET applications from single to multitenancy.

Apprenda introduced version 1.0 of cloud platform in mid-2011. Version 4.0, released in November 2012, add features designed to make it easier to shift between the private and public cloud, with a single-click feature. The company this makes it easier to build next-generation, cloud-based apps and update existing apps without having to change much code. This aims to allow companies the security of the private cloud with the convenience and scalability of the public cloud. In early 2014, Apprenda released version 5.0 of its cloud platform, which includes dynamic scaling and support for Oracle databases.

Funding

Apprenda raised $5 million in 2009, and another $11 million in 2011. It raised its initial $16 million in venture capital financing from High Peaks Venture Partners, Ignition Partners and New Enterprise Associates. In November 2013, Apprenda announced it had raised an additional $16 million. In July 2015, Apprenda raised another $24 million, led by investor Safeguard Scientifics, bringing its total venture stake to $56 million.

Clients

Apprenda's clients include JPMorgan Chase, Boeing, Honeywell, Diebold, McKesson, Symantec, Dell, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and Quest Software.