Is the “underwhelming” acquisition of Dutch Cloud9 by Amazon “not that big of a deal”?

Cloud9, a Dutch founded cloud-based IDE, announced in nothing more than just a teeny-tiny blogpost that they have been acquired by Amazon, to integrate them with its renowned Amazon Web Services. Parts of the six year old company will move to the United States, which already holds an office in San Francisco. No official word from Amazon, though. It kinda feels a bit “underwhelming”. How “big” is the deal, one might be inclined to ask? 

Cloud-based

Cloud9 has had quite the succes in the past years with venture capital with investments from Balderton Capital (undisclosed Series B), Accel and Atlassian ($5.55M Series A in 2011) pouring in. The company offers a developer environment that is entirely cloud-based. According to the company, developers prefer a cloud-based environment over the traditional, bulky desktop versions.

Amazon’s wing

According to Cloud9 founder and Dutchman Ruben Daniels, operating under Amazon’s wing will let the company grow, while assuring users and customers that the platform won’t disappear (for now, of course);

In the meantime, you’ll still be able to depend on and continue to invest safely in Cloud9. It’s still business as usual—we’ll continue to work with our Ace Open Source community and to provide our innovative services to you and our hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. Over time, we’ll work with AWS to do even more on your behalf.

Popular

Cloud9’s popularity amongst developers and coders is big, so Amazon’s move doesn’t come unexpected. Still, it’s unclear at this time what Amazon will specifically do with the platform and services it offers, and in what manner they will integrate it into their existing web services. 

Not big of a deal?

All and all, it’s not that big of a deal – as it may seem for outsiders. Not more than a blogpost on Cloud9’s website is there to announce the deal. No mention of it whatsover on the official AWS’ channels. Yet, we do feel it’s a big thing in the world of cloud computing, as AWS is the global market leader in cloud infrastructure services. As Forbes’ cloud expert puts it, it’s a vital new acquiree in its “parallel universe in the cloud”:

Amazon has been slowly and steadily adding all the essential building blocks of modern software development lifecycle to its arsenal. From source code control to continuous delivery to execution environments, AWS has emerged as a complete platform in the cloud.

What was missing in AWS portfolio is a robust development environment that’s tightly integrated with its platform. With Cloud9 acquisition, Amazon plugs a critical gap in its service offerings.