Pramati Enters the PaaS Market with CloudJee

During 1996, when the Indian IT companies were busy trying to capitalize on the outsourcing and the Y2K rush, Jay Pullur and Vijay Pullur took the unconventional path of setting up Pramati, a product company in Hyderabad. By 1998, Java and J2EE started to become the favorites of enterprise with IBM, BEA and Sun Microsystems trying to win the race in the enterprise application server market. Pramati Server and Pramati Studio, the flagship products developed by Pramati gave rest of the application servers a run for their money. Pramati Server delivered the performance that was comparable to the application server products from IBM (WebSphere), BEA (WebLogic), Sun (i-Planet) and Oracle (Oracle IAS) and that too at one third of the cost. In less than a decade, Pramati claimed to have customers like ICICI, Times Group, BaaN, Majoris, Oribitech and other impressive names.I have tremendous respect for the founders of Pramati. They fought all the odds to build a product company in India and made it to the big league. Gaining visibility and winning global customers required a solid reputation backed by reliable products and Pramati had those attributes! Being a hard core Hyderabadi, I like them for the fact that they chose the twin cities to setup their company instead of Bangalore.

Recently, AutoDesk acquired a product called Qontext built by Pramati. According to TechCrunch “Qontext was one of the most interesting but least-discussed players in the Enterprise 2.0 business. Its killer features have the ability to integrate other applications into its activity stream and embed an activity stream into any other web application. For example you could set it up so that any time a salesperson enters a new lead into a CRM system, an update appears in the Qontext stream, which is embedded into a manager’s e-mail and BI dashboard systems.”

Pramati was recently in news for acquiring WaveMaker from VMware. WaveMaker is a Java IDE for designing business applications and websites. It was clear that Pramati wanted to leverage the investments made in the application server with WaveMaker to come out with a new offering. CloudJee is the latest offering from Pramati’s stable. Platform as a Service or PaaS has a lot of similarities with application servers and containers. The team at Pramati had to tweak the existing code base of the Application Server product to make it multi-tenant and cloud ready to transform it into a PaaS. Combined with WaveMaker, the new product makes a compelling platform on the Cloud.

According to the official press release, “The CloudJee platform is built around Pramati's world-class, cloud-optimized enterprise Java app server and load balancer that's been proven over the last decade across large global customers. The platform also incorporates visual development and instant cloud deployment using WaveMaker technology, recently acquired from VMware, and supported by a 35,000 strong development community. Multi-cloud platform services, auto scaling, provisioning, monitoring, operations management, disaster protection and security are parts of the platform.”

PaaS is crowded with players like Red Hat OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, Heroku, Engine Yard, CloudBees, Cumologic and others. With every player claiming to be polyglot and supporting Java, it will be interesting to watch how Pramati wants to repeat the magic with CloudJEE.