Busy, busy month for those of you keeping score, and I don’t mean the final gold medal count.  But, now that I’ve nodded to the Olympics, congratulations to both team Canada and team USA on the best hockey game I’ve ever seen.  Ever.  And I’m from Boston, home of the sometimes brilliant Bruins.

No, the game I’ve been watching is a tectonic shift of cloud ecosystem money move toward application mobility:

• Makara – funded by Shasta Ventures, Sierra Ventures, as well as the market-moving Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz -- threw back the cloak of stealth.  (Makara Leverages Virtualization to Simplify Cloud Application Management)  According to the release, “Makara provides easy on-boarding to the cloud. With Makara's Cloud Application Platform, developers are able to deploy new or existing web applications to a public or private cloud with no code changes.”  (By the way, makara is apparently a creature in Hindu mythology that acts as a vehicle for water and sky, also serving as the insignia for a god of love and lust … You laugh now, but you’ll thank me some day if you’re ever on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’.)

• Next, CA bellies up to the bar, plunks down a reported $90M (30 times trailing twelve months revenue) and leaves the building with 3Tera (CA to Acquire Cloud Computing Solution Provider 3Tera)  3Tera CEO Barry X Lynn says, “3Tera eliminates the manual, error-prone tasks that have historically hampered an organization's ability to deploy IT services to the cloud,".  30 times  TTM revenue the cloud bubble is bulging.

•  And our friends at VMware continue to be as busy as Santa’s elves in season, spending cash and energy protecting its current dominance in the virtualization market.  Examples include:  VMware ThinApp 4.5 to virtualize server-side applications, and VMware to Acquire Certain IT Management Products and Software Expertise from EMC Corporation which, after naming an all-cash transaction figure of up to $200 million, VMware’s press release – defying the convention of alphabetical order – leads with the technology and intellectual property of FastScale. 

Notice a common theme?  It’s all about moving applications from the data center to the cloud.  By any other name, that’s still AppZero’s application mobility mantra.

Put yourself in my place; It is exciting to see this broad swath of really, really smart people betting large on application mobility as a critical factor in the cloud market’s evolution.  Sand Hill investors, old-iron scavengers in search of a makeover, and virtualization royalty alike are rolling money at application mobility.  And that’s good news for me.

Why?  Because people will begin to ask questions such as, “Why not move the OS and the App in a VM? Doesn’t OVF make this all work across VMs from Xen to VMware from KVM to Hyper-V? Has anyone heard a success reported?”

Quick reality moment and speed check:  Windows 2008 server is about 16-20 GB; SQL Server 2008 1GB, .Net around 500MB. I can move roughly 16-40 application servers with SQL Server or .Net in the time it takes to move one that also includes the OS.  Speed and agility (a 93-97% improvement for those keeping score).  That’s why VMware is changing its strategy on how to move workload from the data center to clouds, and automating workloads in private clouds.

The name of this cloud game is speed and flexibility at the application layer.

So far the market is building out on top of server virtualization, known primarily for reducing the number of physical machines and associated cost.  Infrastructure can be provisioned in a matter of minutes on a self serve basis.  The fly in the ointment is that the purpose of infrastructure is to run applications and they are installed 1 at a time.  Once installed, applications become welded to the OS.  The result is that they then have to be managed individually, which dramatically adds to the cost and complexity of just doing work.

Application virtualization separates an application from the OS making it mobile and automatable -- between machines, between the data center and between clouds – external and private.  Application mobility brings a clean interface to the app stack making it possible to provision apps in minutes just the same way Hypervisors provision machines in minutes. 

The combination of the two virtualizations is what IT needs to deliver what the business needs. 

There is also compelling software consolidation that can be achieved by running more than one application on a software stack (OS, anti virus, management, etc) in isolation.  Software consolidation will free up more budget as this movement takes hold.  Simple math says that running two applications on one OS can cut OS licensing requirements in half.  Bigger math gets bigger results.  Gartner better lower their predictions for Microsoft’s server revenue over the coming years.

I do dream in color, not always vivid color, but color just the same. Today, I was awakened by one of my 5 boys in the middle of a great dream about the future. In my dream, I was in a big white room just as a door was opening and someone was about to walk in. Who was that? That’s when I was awakened.

Don’t you hate dream interruption? Or Idruption? Quick note, I heard the iPad comes with an Idruption finisher, those guys at Apple are so innovative.

What I do recall from my dream was that it was the summer of 2012, and Jeff Bezos, Paul Sagan and I were celebrating the 2 year anniversary of the merger of our three companies. There was a lot of talk about how 50% of the Fortune 1000 had shut down their data centers and moved all their operations onto our Dream Cloud. So much for that Gartner prediction –“By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.”  The other thing that was clear from the conversation was that Dream Computing as a category had completely replaced the term Cloud Computing.

Akazon’s (the combined company’s name) market capitalization had just crossed the trillion dollar mark. We had over 10 million physical machines or 10 billion virtual instances all around the world thanks to the new Dream chip from Intamd. Close to 70% of the internet traffic was flowing through the Akazon Dream Cloud. The year had started with Paul convincing the board to turn down Eric’s request for us to acquire Google. Paul’s core argument was that Google’s search and ad businesses were going to be replaced by our Dream fulfillment engine. The search-to-decision-to-Dream fulfillment evolution had taken hold. We had solved the issues in China and had a commanding share in this huge piece of the world market. Eric, Larry, and Sergey were not happy but it was clear they were becoming a legacy supplier, and we found a dream number even more magical than √2.

2011 was very busy for Jeff as we divested our online shopping division. I was really surprised Jeff took the lead on this and got such a great price from Larry at Oracle (he never really believed in Dream Computing or its predecessor Cloud Computing). By selling databases, applications and hardware direct in their new online store, Larry had replaced almost his entire sales force. It did do wonders for their margins and profitability.

2010 had been the year in which the Dream was defined. The public Dream, the private Dream, the hybrid Dream, and the enterprise Dream were now clear to the world. Where the environments are located, security concerns, how to move applications from the enterprise to the Dream and back again were completely nailed. The Dream economy was born and unemployment was under 5%. As a side note, national health care had not come to a final vote.

Yes, 2010 was the year Dream Computing was born. The market understood what Cloud Computing (infrastructure as a service, platform as a service) was. Amazon was leading the pack, delivering the self-service, pay-as-you-go, resources-on-demand, utility-in-the-sky. Topping the 1 million developers mark. The challenges to Cloud Computing adoption were surfacing for those in the business.

Secure distribution, and moving existing applications unchanged to the cloud were beginning to slow the paradigm shift down.

Akamai saw competition coming from the roll-it-yourself CDN developers using geographically-distributed clouds, and the world saw more and more content being part of everyday applications. Not as demanding as streaming a Victoria’s Secret video, but delivering more content to the edge faster was a foundation of Dream Computing. It also occurred to Akamai that they had a ton of compute horsepower for serving up those images to millions of eyeballs focused on Heidi Klum and the Black Eyed Peas, which they could sell during the other 364 days and 21 hours. Talk about a spiky workload and over-provisioning. Why not just build out the data centers Akamai had around the world and extend them to have the capabilities like those in Amazon? With global real-time distribution, low latency, and the ability to limit network attacks as the next layer added on to that old concept of Cloud Computing, the transition was underway.

The last piece of the puzzle was the application containment and provisioning provided by Virtual Application Appliances (VAA) from AppZero. The ability to scoop up and move existing applications to any of the Dream Computing nodes, or across any node and back again, was the grease that finished off the legacy concept of Cloud Computing. Moving just an application, not the whole machine, and being able to determine what has changed from provision to provision, made utilizing the dream fabric in the ether easy. Separating and isolating the application or workload from the OS became a “duh.” The death of installing applications and commingling them with OS had gone mainstream with dynamic provisioning replacing standard operations. VAA had become a movement that is now being taught in high schools today. Whoever came up with installing applications anyhow?

Dreaming about Dream Computing  – Now I remember how it ended. It was Paul Maritz at the door. He was there to get us to buy Zimbra from him. Funny how the pioneers and thought leaders of today become a distant legacy dream so quickly. I recall sending him over to see if he could sell Zimbra to Apple. It would be a good service for their iDream offering that we run and manage for Steve while Paul focused on the Bed Bath and Beyond business.

Did you ever have the invisible dream?  I don’t like it.  It’s the one where I have “the answer” to a big problem (usually involving giant, malevolent aliens) but everyone walks right past me because I’m invisible. I had that feeling yesterday reading James Urquhart’s blog titled, “Application packaging for cloud computing: A proposal”.

He’d written a series of posts considering deployment and operations in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments. Looking at the impact of cloud computing on the use of virtual machines and operating systems, Urquhart wrote, “The very heart and soul of software systems design is being challenged by the decoupling of infrastructure architectures from the software architectures that run on them.”

Yes.  Exactly what I’ve been saying.  Exactly what AppZero does in divorcing server applications from the underlying OS in virtual application appliances (VAA).

Urquhart goes on to say that the more he explores the question of IaaS/PaaS server application packaging in light of what he calls his “big rethink,” the more he thinks…” there is an opportunity to simplify cloud computing through changing the focus from infrastructure to applications.”  Yes, again.

He suggested that the answer might be found in, “a uniform description of an application, its configuration, and its operational requirements that can be used to describe any software deliverable to the cloud, whether meant for IaaS or PaaS.” He allows as how “such a packaging format would have to be open and standard,” (read, in the land of distant future where most visions live.) 

My take is that Urquhart has proposed far more than standardized application packaging. What he has sketched is a proposal for a cloud system application lifecycle. To that notion, I give James two thumbs up. But no smart proposal changes the basic fact that when an installation inter-mixes an application with the OS, complexity follows with inflexibility and cloud lock-in. And its cousin datacenter lock-out.

So here’s where that bad dream feeling starts to sneak up on me: The world has embraced the great benefit that comes from decoupling the OS from hardware but leaves the rest of the software stack as a giant, monolithic black box.  And it doesn’t have to.

If the cloud as IaaS or PaaS provided separation of server application and OS we’d:

• Enjoy the cost savings of using the OS license provided by the likes of Amazon and GoGrid instead of building our own image with our own OS license
• Expect the cloud provider to stay current with OS and security updates instead of doing our own patch management in the cloud
• Have the option of moving up the stack to use cloud provider middleware like SQL Server, MySQL, WebSphere, or Oracle WebLogic Server, adding the rest of the pieces I need to make my application sing like a springtime robin. The way I see it cloud users going up the stack and using other middleware components are building new apps, not leveraging the cloud stack to its fullest potential
• Move more responsibility, cost, and management overhead from our side of the ledger to that of the cloud providers.  Why would you want to do anything that your cloud vendor can do and is already charging you to do?
• Avoid cloud lock-in and enable where to run flexibility.  Applications can move from data center to cloud to cloud in a matter of minutes
• Get the benefits of VM’s decoupling and isolation at the application/application component layer -- mobility and consolidation at the software stack level, not just hardware.

Just as good fences make good neighbors, the isolation that comes with server application virtualization makes crystal clear who is responsible for what – lines of demarcation that can get really cloudy (yes, pun) once you move up the stack from basic machine provisioning. What’s more, application virtualization is perfect for moving all or any part of an app from a data center to a cloud to another cloud and back to the datacenter. 

Today.  With AppZero.  Can you hear me now?

Three of the chattiest executives on God's green earth were struck suddenly speechless when the Q&A segment of their VCE coalition announcement produced a straight forward question from customer Joseph Hooks (at point 48:50 in the announcement).

Question: "Will we be able to seamlessly move (applications) between in-house vblocks (private clouds) and service provider vblocks (public clouds)?"

• There was complete silence.
• There were multiple fingers that swiftly and decisively pointed to Paul Maritz of VMware
• There was silence.
• There was nervous laughter from the audience
• There was nervous laughter and jocular comments from the panel (Virtual Computing Environment coalition executives: Ciscos' John Chambers, EMC's Joe Tucci, and VMware's Paul Maritz.).
• There was seat squirming and there were darting glances between the executives.
• There was the ad hoc suggestion from Chambers, "We can start with the feet next -- We can do a chorus line here." (... the universal call for a tap dance)

In the end it was VMware's Paul Maritz who won the call to answer.

Answer:  "The short answer is, that is exactly the goal.  A lot of pieces have to come together to make that happen.  It all depends on what you mean by 'move seamlessly'."

He went on to mention issues such as management, moving workloads, security, and identity management concluding, "So we are tackling the issue of portability at every level.  And the goal is about the journey we're setting out on, so that over time the customer can make business decisions as opposed to architectural or operational decisions."

Translation: No.

This answer means that server applications will experience every bit as much lock-in from the multi-million dollar world of VCE Vblocks as in today's public cloud environments.  They would be Vlocks.  Get it?  Locked in by Vblocks = Vlock.  (Yes, I crack myself up.)

This observation is not a commentary on the VCE coalition concept of Vblock Infrastructure packages of tightly integrated offerings from EMC and Cisco, using VMware goods.  Nor does it breath a word about Acadia, EMC and Cisco's joint venture, with an assist from Intel, to build, operate, and transfer (BOT) vblock infrastructure to organizations "who want to accelerate their journey."  (Okay.  Guilty.  I did perhaps snicker when Tucci managed to use the word journey more than 20 times in less than 5 minutes during his segment of the content-rich one hour announcement venue.  To me, "journey" is always a code word for "our vision is not available today."  )

My point is simple and predictable:  The wild frontier of server application portability across private and public clouds, to and from data centers, on physical and virtual servers is a challenge that-so far - only AppZero has domesticated.  I say free your app today.  Why wait?  Make it portable and run your business where you want to run it.  No V-wait or V$$$s required.

Follow Greg O'Connor on Twitter @gregoryjoconnor

Here's my premise:  high impact, culture-bending technological innovations - however different they may be one from another - conform to a predictable template of evolution.  It goes something like this:

1.       Break-thru - The point of entry at which a technology breaks onto the market scene doing something old in a dramatically new way.  The break-thru vendor, frequently a modest sized venture or start-up, faces the uphill struggle to educate, and otherwise evangelize its would-be market.  It is an expensive, labor-intensive phase in which there the potential rewards are as high as the risk of failure.  Early adopters assume the risk of pioneering to gain substantial advantages in costs and/or performance.

2.       Break-even - The period of maturity during which an ecosystem develops around this technology to improve, optimize, manage, and extend it.  Much of the activity in this phase is directed to making the technology enterprise-grade.  Hype, risk, and pricing level off as the technology moves from upstart to mainstream.

3.       Break-out - The window of opportunity in which innovators springboard off the mature gains of the now-established technology to do something truly new.  Frequently the 'something new' is enabled by the confluence of technologies and business drivers.  This phase offers the greatest potential gains at the lowest risk.

AppZero is a break-out company doing something new; VMware is the break-thru company that did something old in a dramatically new way.  This observation is not a slam.  Note the title - "VMware's genius".  That's praise, right?  They definitely started something new and altered the IT/business culture.  But, they started it all by doing something old ... better.  Much better.

Boring?  Apparently not since VMware holds the record for being the company with the fastest time to $1 Billion.  The reason for the spectacular growth was so simple - dramatic cost savings addressing a universal problem.

Business as usual in the data center had traditionally been to not only plan for the worst, but to provision for it as well.  So it came to be common for an application to sit on its very own server, using less then 10% of its CPU and resources, except for the occasional spike that edged utilization briefly upwards.  Multiply this scenario by however many applications live in a data center and the number is a very big dollar amount of sheer, bottom-line chewing waste.  Hardware, software, management, maintenance, sysadmins, space, utilities ......

Break-thru:  Enter VMware with its ESX hypervisor, which divorced server operating systems (OS) from server hardware in virtual machines (VM).  Server consolidation and all it implies hit a real meat and potatoes enterprise IT issue with a hugely cost-savings solution.  Modern day server virtualization was born and a market was created, complete with its de facto leader.

Break-even: Server sprawl was also born, joining the ranks of general issues such as manageability, governance, and security.  The usual suspects --CA, BMC, IBM et al - soon jumped in with management options that bring virtualized servers into the corporate fold.  Citrix/Xen and Microsoft threw their own hypervisor hats into VMware's ring making a brand new heterogeneous VM landscape, complete with the usual challenges of choice:.  What if I want to move my application across these different VMs? What if my data center runs VMware and Microsoft but I want to move some of my workload to Amazon, which is based on Xen?

VMware remains the market leader.  But constrained by the installed base of its success, it is unlikely to jump back into a break-thru round of innovation.  Rather, it is likely to continue improving its offerings, securing its market position, and harvesting the ongoing rewards of the first two phases.

Break-out: Now it gets interesting again.  At the intersection of virtualization, SOA, and the Internet, comes cloud computing - public, private, and hybrid.  The sky's the limit for break-out use cases.  Cost-savings like crazy.  Efficiencies unimaginable a decade ago.  IT and business alignment like a honeymoon.... How?  By virtualizing servers?  Not exactly.  You only cut costs in server consolidation when server applications actually run on those virtualized servers.  And that's a problem.

The ad hoc ability to provision server-side applications to and from servers - physical or virtual -- in the datacenter, from cloud to other cloud, and back to earth is necessary to fully exploit the potential of infrastructure on demand.  But that level of mobility is just not available in technology designed to separate an OS from a physical server.  And that includes the virtual appliance (VA), which packages applications with the lowest level of OS components required to run.

But any OS component in a deployment package is too much if you want cloud-neutral mobility - the opposite of vendor lock-in.  (I'll maybe describe why in a later blog.)

Enter AppZero with its Virtual Application Appliance (VAA).  Our customers package their server-side applications with all of the dependencies, but with zero OS component.  Unencumbered by the intermingling of OS and application that is introduced at installation, VAA-packaged applications arrive at destination servers (physical or virtual, on premise or in the cloud) ready to run and ready to depart at the click of a button.

No lock-in.  Complete mobility.  The functional equivalent of a neutral runtime environment - at home on any server that has a compatible OS.

A break-out solution for doing something new.  Thank you VMware.