"While we’ve already begun executing aggressively, this financing will help us further fuel delivery and adoption of our PaaS," said CloudBees Founder & CEO Sacha Labourey as he announced recently that CloudBees had secured $4 million in Series A financing led by Matrix Partners with participation from individual investors, including JBoss founder Marc Fleury and JBoss/HP/Bluestone veteran Bob Bickel.

"I am pleased that Matrix, Marc, Bob and others have the confidence in our technology, strategy and first-rate technical team to provide us with capital to grow,” Labourey added.

Through this Series A round CloudBees is becoming quite the JBoss reunion. Labourey himself is former CTO of JBoss, while Bickel served as JBoss’ Vice President of Strategy, playing a critical role in forming the company’s business model and strategic partnerships, as well as securing early key executive hires.

Marc Fleury (pictured) of course was JBoss's founder.


Marc Fluery dancing the Macarena for SYS-CON.TV viewers back in 2006

But the reunion doesn't end there. Far from it. Joining the CloudBees BoD along with Bickel is Matrix General Partner David Skok, who was the original lead investor in JBoss, which was acquired by Red Hat in 2006 for $350 million.

What the reunited JBoss team is doing is creating the first Cloud-agnostic Java Platform as a Service (PaaS), a play succinctly described by Fleury as follows:

"The cloud represents a new opportunity for disruption, similar to what I saw with Enterprise Java 10 years ago. Just as JBoss provided a streamlined and useable alternative to BEA and IBM, CloudBees will be providing innovation and ease of use compared to VMware’s bloated cloud stacks."

Skok is much energized by the CloudBees strategy of establishing a foothold in the cloud for driving Java innovation.

"PaaS is the next logical evolution of cloud computing," he notes, "and the PaaS layer that CloudBees is building the future of how applications will be built and run. We believe this represents an enormous market, and this team well positioned to execute on it."