James is editor in chief of TechForge Media, with a passion for how technologies influence business and several Mobile World Congress events under his belt. James has interviewed a variety of leading figures in his career, from former Mafia boss Michael Franzese, to Steve Wozniak, and Jean Michel Jarre. James can be found tweeting at @James_T_Bourne.











Enterprise PaaS provider CloudBees has today announced a partnership with Verizon to make its platform as a service available on Verizon Cloud.

This represents another hefty addition to the telco’s rapidly growing cloud ecosystem, after announcing a middleware partnership with Oracle back in January.

For Sacha Labourey, CloudBees CEO, the marriage seems a perfect fit, due to CloudBees’ market position in PaaS and Verizon’s enterprise experience.

“There was an interest in offering platform as a service on top of the Verizon cloud,” the CloudBees CEO told CloudTech. He added: “I think on the market we’re being recognised as having some leadership in terms of delivering PaaS as a service – a number of companies are doing it as a software and Verizon was looking for a way to offer this directly as a service.”

With the enterprise arm of its Jenkins solution in full swing, Labourey was quick to note CloudBees’ speciality in that sector.

“We understand what enterprises are looking for, what kind of worries they might have,” Labourey said. “This was also appealing to Verizon, because it’s exactly who they serve.”

With this, alongside the Oracle partnership, Verizon is taking its cloud bet very seriously.

“We’ve been in touch with Verizon for a while,” Labourey said. “I’ve been in touch with [CTO] John Considine for quite a period of time, and we’ve seen that evolution within Verizon.

“This is definitely not a project that just started a few months ago. We can clearly see this is understood as being a strategic direction of the company. So that was very important to us as well,” he added.

Labourey noted the partnership with Verizon allows CloudBees customers to have more choice and ‘a different relationship with an infrastructure as a service vendor’ – with Amazon Web Services in his sights.

“Even though Amazon is clearly leading today in terms of IaaS, you’ll find lots of companies that do not feel at ease getting a contractual relationship set up with Amazon,” Labourey said. “It’s all click through, you can’t really negotiate anything, and when it comes to security [customers] don’t feel like they can necessarily have the right answers.

“It doesn’t mean that Amazon is not doing the right thing under the hood, but [customers] might want this to be clearly stated in contracts and so on.

“This is where Verizon can clearly bring some increased value,” he added.

Verizon Cloud, announced in October, is now at public beta stage with two offerings, the IaaS platform Verizon Cloud Compute, and Verizon Cloud Storage. Not an awful lot of differentiation there, but the 25GB of free cloud storage for everyone who signs up to the telco’s new ‘More Everything’ policy will certainly be a sweetener.

What do you make of this partnership? Does Verizon have enough differentiation to take on Amazon?