AppFog, formerly PHP Fog,
the leading cloud-based PHP PaaS hosting service that makes it easy to deploy
and scale web based applications, today announced it has secured an $8 million
Series B led by Ignition Partners with participation from new investors Simon
Crosby and Matt Ocko and previous investors, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and
Founders Co-Op. This brings the company's total funding to $9.8
million. Frank Artale, managing director at Ignition, will join the board of
directors, which includes AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson and Madrona partner Tim
Porter. AppFog will use the
funding to integrate broader technologies and increase the development team
working on AppFog, the technology that powers PHP Fog. While the name has
changed, AppFog remains fully committed to providing the best possible
experience to the millions of PHP users around the world.
According
to a number of industry analyst firms, the next big growth area in cloud
computing will be the rise of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology, which is
beginning to eclipse bare-bones infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) because it
dramatically simplifies application lifecycle management and offers users
application portability across IaaS providers. AppFog consumes IaaS services,
offering a powerful platform that enables application developers to rapidly
create and automatically and seamlessly scale PHP-based applications.
AppFog
was founded in August 2010 and in under a year has added nearly 20,000 application developers who
have collectively created and deployed approximately 10,000 applications using
its platform.
“The PaaS market is
incredibly exciting right now, and while there are a number of new entrants, I
was attracted to AppFog for its strong technical and leadership track record,"
said Artale. "Additionally, their commitment and leadership in open source
provides them with a unique position to provide a solid product and help drive a
movement that will significantly benefit enterprise IT."
“The growth of public
PaaS services has been largely fueled by the demand of individual developers,
often creating new apps on smartphones and tablets. AppFog has capitalized on
this to develop its platform and to broaden its opportunity beyond the consumer
market. AppFog will make any cloud – public or private - instantly consumable
by app developers who don’t want to get bogged down in the intricacies of
infrastructure services. They want to write apps using languages they know,
deliver them to users quickly, and scale them seamlessly and automatically based
on end user demand,” said Crosby. “The next phase of AppFog’s growth will come
from the enterprise market, where next-gen apps will be directly developed for a
PaaS platform, using whatever language the developer
chooses.”
The AppFog
application stack is designed to provide reliability, ease of use, scalability
and speed. The company has talked to thousands of developers and IT departments
to understand their unique pain points and build an infrastructure that
automates scalability and makes the deployment and management of applications
easy. The company is known for its rock-solid service and support, backed by its
active developer
community.
“We started the
company to catalyze the development of PHP apps because it is the most widely
used language across consumer and enterprise web based apps. We are deeply
committed to the PHP community and to our open source roots, and as we grow, we
will leverage our platform to offer the same powerful application development
framework to developers who use Node, Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, and more," said
Carlson. "Frank Artale brings a wealth of both enterprise and open source
experience to AppFog, and will help to guide our strategy as we continue to grow
our presence with individual developers and in the enterprise.”