ActiveState Acquires Perl Cloud Company, Phenona, to Accelerate Cloud Strategy

VANCOUVER, BC--(Marketwire - Jun 14, 2011) - ActiveState, the dynamic language experts offering solutions for Perl, Python, Tcl and other web languages, is announcing today that it has acquired Phenona, a Perl Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud company based in Seattle, WA. This announcement follows on the heels of ActiveState's Stackato cloud platform announcement last month, an enterprise cloud offering based on VMware's Cloud Foundry. Phenona's 15-year-old founder, Daniil Kulchenko, will join the ActiveState team part-time since he is still a student in high school.

"The technology, knowledge, and talent from Phenona will extend a key part of our cloud strategy while helping us accelerate our development in this fast-paced market," said Bart Copeland, President & CEO at ActiveState. "Daniil's a talented programmer and shares our vision for simplifying cloud deployment. Integrating Phenona with ActiveState means quicker time-to-market for the cloud solutions that developers and enterprises are demanding."

"I created Phenona after a contract job where I found it difficult to deploy a Perl web app to the cloud and couldn't find a good PaaS solution in the market. It seemed like there should be an easier way," said Daniil Kulchenko, founder of Phenona. "Based on interest in Phenona's beta program, there is obviously serious demand for this. Joining ActiveState will greatly accelerate our goal of bringing the best solution on the market for deploying apps to the cloud."

"This acquisition is a validation that ActiveState is determined to move quickly into the cloud space," said Al Hilwa, Program Director, Applications Development Software, IDC. "This move is further evidence of the high level of energy and innovation taking place in the cloud application platform space, and highlights how companies are moving to pool their efforts to strengthen their offerings."

Phenona's use of open source components, portability, security and multi-tenancy model all fit closely with ActiveState's cloud strategy. ActiveState will leverage Phenona's stack, which includes Perl modules, MySQL, Redis, and Mojolicious, into the ActiveState cloud product roadmap.

Phenona had not been publicly launched at the time of the acquisition but was working with private beta testers. ActiveState will continue to work with those beta testers and future product plans will be announced at a later date. In the meantime, while ActiveState is not accepting new beta testers for Phenona, interested parties may request access to the developer preview for Stackato, ActiveState's enterprise cloud platform built on Cloud Foundry. More information is available at http://www.activestate.com/cloud.

About ActiveState
ActiveState is a world leader in enabling companies to develop, manage, and distribute applications with dynamic languages. The company's products and services for Perl, Python, Tcl and other web languages are used by over 2 million developers and 97% of the Fortune 1000 to build and run applications from mission-critical to open source projects. ActiveState's end-to-end solutions include development tools, language distributions, indemnification, OEM solutions, support and other services. With these, customers such as Cisco, CA, HP, Bank of America, Siemens, and Lockheed Martin are able to accelerate productivity, minimize risk, and ensure compliance. Find out more at www.ActiveState.com.