The extremely competitive cloud market has claimed another victim that failed to find a way to make money.
The Platform-as-a-Service company dotCloud revealed to its users that it will be ending its services on the 29th of February.
The former Docker company was acquired by Cloud Control in 2014 in a move that allowed Docker to focus its efforts on the containerisation side of its business.
The idea behind purchasing dotCloud at the time was to help kickstart its US market expansion, in addition to further establishing itself in the EU.
In an email sent to its users, dotCloud CEO Philipp Strube said: "Unfortunately I have to inform you, that cloudControl our German parent company has filed for bankruptcy.
"Due to this, dotCloud will be shutdown on February 29, 2016. To avoid service disruption of your apps hosted on dotCloud or prevent data loss, you are required to migrate your applications. To keep the migration effort for you as low as possible, we recommend migrating to Heroku."
The decision to file for bankruptcy by cloudControl was made after one of its main customers reduced its business with the company.
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The dotCloud CEO went on to recommend Heroku, the Salesforce owned PaaS, because it is compatible with dotCloud, so while the company admits that 30 days notice of closure is not ideal, it hopes that this compatibility will make migrations easier.
cloudControl was founded in 2009 and focused on developing a multi-language PaaS that was designed to supercharge the development of applications and business solutions by enabling rapid innovation cycles.
cloudControl’s bankruptcy and the decision to close dotCloud are not the first cloud casualties of the past 12 months or even of 2016.
Although Gartner projects that the PaaS market will grow 21.1% in 2016, with the worldwide public cloud services market forecast to reach $204bn this year which represents a 16.5% growth on 2015, for some though it has proved impossible to compete.
Earlier this month Square Enix decided to shut down its cloud-based gaming service Shinra Technologies, while last year Adobe killed off its cloud photo storage offering, Revel and in October HPE revealed that it would be closing down its Helion Public Cloud.
It isn’t necessarily just the smaller cloud companies that are struggling to make money; the big companies have to make hard decisions whether or not to continue with trying to compete.
Although the PaaS market is growing, it is hard to determine how much of that growth is being spread around the companies in the market compared to how much is going to the major cloud provider Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Microsoft is due to reports its financial results late on Thursday as will Amazon so we will be able to get an insight into how well their cloud products are doing compared to companies that are struggling.
Offering specialised expertise in an area of cloud doesn’t always equate to success and as the big three players extend their lead at the top of the cloud market, others may well follow cloudControl and dotCloud in shutting their doors.
