Apcera Launches First Policy-Driven IT Platform for Global 2000 Companies

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Sep 22, 2014) - Apcera® today unveiled Continuum™, its policy-driven platform that empowers both developers and operational teams to quickly and efficiently deploy, orchestrate and govern a diverse set of workloads on premise and in the cloud. Unlike traditional PaaS, Continuum is an enterprise-class IT platform that integrates policy and governance to achieve a significantly faster time-to-market deployment without sacrificing crucial security requirements.

"In today's increasingly complex IT environments, enterprises are faced with a number of challenges. They can move quickly but with greater risk, or maintain security at the expense of agility. These trade-offs often result in friction between the developers and ops organizations, as each group pursues its own core mission," said Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Apcera. "With Continuum, we provide a comprehensive platform that will enable enterprises to move full speed ahead with innovation, yet seamlessly integrate policy so they can maintain control from the outset."

The need for a flexible, yet secure, platform is becoming increasingly apparent, as about 70 percent of businesses surveyed by Gartner said they will be pursuing hybrid cloud solutions by next year. More than half of businesses said that agility was their top driver in moving to the cloud, but 64 percent indicated that complexity and lack of compliance control were inhibiting their desire to adopt cloud solutions.

"Developers want to move with lightning speed, but their progress often comes to a screeching halt once the app reaches the operations team, which needs to ensure that the new app works properly and adheres to policy within the current IT environment," said Puneet Agarwal, Partner at True Ventures. "Current PaaS offerings just don't go far enough to ease this friction, since they were designed simply to speed innovation of greenfield apps. Apcera's Continuum dramatically changes the equation, by offering a broad, flexible platform that takes into consideration the needs of other organizations within the enterprise."

Developed in the Go programming language, Continuum addresses these concerns by providing enterprises with a number of advantages over conventional PaaS solutions, including the ability to:

• Run Diverse Workloads on Preferred Infrastructure - With Continuum, developers can deploy a range of workloads -- from legacy applications and operating systems to web and mobile apps or Docker images -- and ops then can run those workloads securely across various environments on premise in their own data centers, in the cloud or with a hybrid infrastructure.
  
  
• Orchestrate Workloads - Once an app, operating system or other workload is running, Continuum provides the orchestration to help them communicate with other workloads and external services. Continuum assists with discovering, addressing, connecting and recovering or load balancing between both internal and external workloads. All of this is done transparently.
  
  
• Govern Data Resources - Continuum helps transparently and instantaneously enforce IT policies to govern all data resources and ensure IT is fast, safe and efficient. Policy is built into the core of the Continuum platform, which features semantic awareness to control system behavior, monitor connections and increase visibility; ephemeral channel bound credentials for a robust security framework; and isolation contexts to enable workload security, portability, fault tolerance and automation.
  
  

How Continuum Works
Whether it's an application, service or legacy workload, Continuum views it simply as a "job." The underlying policy framework enables users to dictate job connectivity, identity and access. With an intuitive interface, users can easily add value where needed, such as package ingestion and preparation, service provisioning and connectivity, service consumption and failover, logging and diagnostics, compliance and controls, and health and monitoring.

"Companies struggle with the proliferation of new technologies that force engineering teams to stitch together systems and then bolt on policy as an afterthought -- which is not optimal," said Mike Abbott, general partner at KPCB. "Apcera elegantly solves this problem and meets the requirements of enterprise IT infrastructure today and well into the future while delivering speed, agility, and reduced risk."

About Apcera
Based in San Francisco, Calif., Apcera has deployed the world's first policy-driven platform for global 2000 companies. Apcera's flagship product is Continuum, a platform that deploys, orchestrates and governs a diverse set of workloads, either on premise or in the cloud. The company was founded in 2012, with investment from True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Rakuten, Andreessen Horowitz and Data Collective. For more information, visit apcera.com, read our blog or follow us on twitter: @apcera.