Consolidation has been one of the main trends of 2011. In December of last year, Salesforce.com acquired Ruby PaaS Heroku and, Hat acquired Java PaaS Makara and CloudBees acquired Stax Networks. That lead to much speculation about the future of PaaS consolidation. But the real consolidation action in 2011 has been in telcos acquiring infrastructure-as-a-service companies. Meanwhile companies like VMware have decided to build instead of buy PaaS companies.
Today GigaOm’s Derrick Harris broke the news that dotCloud is acquiring DuoStack. It seems that this sort of acquisition is a long time coming.
Both DuoStack and DotCloud offer support for cutting edge technologies like Node.js and several NoSQL databases including Apache CouchDB, MongoDB and Redis.
DotCloud Founder and CEO Solomon Hykes told GigaOM that since the features of the two services overlapped there was little value in DotCloud and DuoStack “butting heads.” Indeed it does make sense for the platforms to compete with larger companies like VMware and Red Hat than each other.
Does this mean the PaaS consolidation game is back on? Not necessarily. It’s a young and confusing space, and as we noted above some companies are choosing to build instead of buy. However, given how quickly the space has gotten competitive, further consolidation is inevitable. But it may take some time.
Photo by LukeGordon1