ActiveState is a business application software development company that claims to serve roughly 97 percent of Fortune-100 companies including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and CA Technologies. Next up, ActiveState is developing Stackato, a private platform-as-a-service (PaaS) effort.

According to ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland, Stackato 1.0 can be integrated into any stack, on any cloud platform, in any language.  Copeland went on to stress that Stackato is designed to give web application developers three main benefits.

Stackato can be used to both code and simulate a new production and environment. And afterward, Stackato can launch the new application to any cloud platform. Business customers and independent application developers alike can use the Stackato development platform to develop, deploy, migrate, scale, manage and monit applications in any cloud environment.

But at the end of the day, ActiveState says its Stackato 1.0 solution is designed specifically for enterprise IT users. According to the company, enterprise IT departments using Stackato will benefit from new high levels of data security, a reduced time to market, financial savings, compliance and overall greater control over their own  cloud environment.

In speaking with several ActiveState executives about a week before the release of Stackato, they stressed that this is the biggest announcement since the company upgraded its PaaS platform by adding support HP Cloud Services back in January of this year.

ActiveState VP and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Jeff Hobbs even went as far as calling Stackato “a new paradigm when it comes to the way application development teams produce cloud applications.” We’ll see if more companies buy into the new Stackato platform.