I was talking through the features, and roadmap for SecureDB with their team the other day, and one of the conversations that came up was around on-premise opporutnities for deploying encrypted user, data, and file APIs. In my opinion, on-premise is something that has morphed from meaning "in our data center", to where wherever we store data and run our compute power--which could be spread across multiple cloud vendors.
SecureDB offers an extremely valuable API commodity in 2015, encrypted user, data, and file stores--something EVERY website and mobile application should have as part of their back-end. When you have something this valuable, and potentnially ubiquitous, it needs to run wherever it is needed. With this in mind SecureDB is available on demand, as a retail API solution, but they will also deploy it for you "on-premise" on AWS or Heroku, with "more platforms in the roadmap".
While a wholesale, on-premise, deploy anywhere API will not be required for all APIs, as some SaaS solutions won't benefit from this type of distribution, if you are a core architectural building block, or utility APIs like SecureDB, to compete in the API economy, your API will have to deployable to anywhere it is needed. With the explosion of Docker and Kubernetes, your API should technically be able to able to be deployed in any containerized environment, with a business model, licensing, and legal framework to support the different use cases.
The ability to deploy your API on Heroku is just a gateway drug to the wholesale, white lable, containerized, API economy that is coming, where the most agile, flexible, and interoperable APIs will dominate.
