One of my favorite jobs was working in corporate development and looking at companies to acquire back at Progress Software. We had a couple hundred million in the bank, low single digit organic growth, margins expanding from 20% by 2 or 3% per year, and had gotten addicted to buying top line revenue to “juice” our top line. 

Corporate development got to go shopping for acquisitions, meeting with tons of small to medium sized companies to find the next one that met our model and fit our strategy. We called the activity around this shopping “kissing frogs” and “turning over rocks.”  When we found a live one, I would:

1. vet them
2. buy them,  and
3. run like hell – far away from the integration team.

Why run?  Because no matter how diligently one does due diligence, there is always a difference between the “story” (business-as-promised) and the “install” (business-as-practiced). Once the board signed off on the company’s proposition, value, and financials, the hard work of learning how to productively “live together” began – and the age-old difference between selling and installing quickly became apparent.

No matter how hard you squinted, few of the companies we talked with were going to turn into a prince and dramatically change the vector of the company. Realistically, everyone knows that most deals fail to meet expectations. (At Progress we batted about 400.)

Here’s how it works with managed providers on the story-sell-install timeline:

The Story: Dear CIO; as your provider, we can run and manage the operational part of your data center more efficiently than you can. Afterall, we have efficiencies of scale, proven superior best practices, and there will be a “clean” line of demarcation between the app that performs the business function and the pesky infrastructure that makes the apps run. We will modernize your aging data center, move “your mess” and run it for “less.” This arrangement will save you money, free your folks to focus on your ‘core competencies’ of providing what the business needs, and we will provide you with better SLAs because we are experts.

The Sell:  What’s not to love about that story? The strategic rationale is clear (focus on the business) and the financial model is one my mother could understand (it’s cheaper). Oh sure, yeah there was a bit of heart burn about taking way loyal-employee-#25’s  badge and making him an employee of our new partner Mr. Service Provider. But, in the end, it makes great business sense. So, the deal flies through all the committees and gets signed off by the board.

The install:  Here’s where it all starts to go downhill. Where selling and installing meet. How do all those legacy applications get transformed into the brave new world? Answer: They don’t. They get “temporarily” moved -- lock, stock, and barrel with their existing infrastructures – along with the promise that they will be modernized later. Much later. .. because that transformation is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. In order to run as efficiently as possible, the MSP quest is to have all the apps on a uniform operating stack (hardware, OS, patch level, security, monitoring, back-up, etc). One-offs mean diversity and diversity destroys margins. 

Normally, MSPs are faced with a long, linear, labor-intensive effort to move an application that includes 1) capture, 2) extract, 3) operation-alize and then 4) transform. The linear approach takes a long period of time with no assurance that transformation will ever occur.  There are few tools that automate the process and it’s tedious as well as error-prone.

appzero is making that approach obsolete with a product designed specifically for easy, flexible extraction and transformation of applications. Extraction and transformation occur simultaneously with delivery to operations. The MSP does the transformation concurrently with the extraction. 

Consider this analogy: Before ETL tools existed, companies would dump a DB to a spreadsheet. It would be up to a person to manually de-dup, clean, augment, validate, and then reload into the data warehouse. When ETL came along, it sent this approach back to the Stone Age for all but the tiniest of companies. Today, appzero is the ETL equivalent when it comes to moving applications from data center to MSP, or cloud. Swift and efficient.

The appzeo approach of transforming an application during the move guarantees that the applications are running on an operations stack that is homogenous, uniform and consistent. And there you have your competitive advantage. A clean match between “the story” and the “install” means good-bye to one-off margin-destroying diversity and hello to robust, predictable profit margins.

Join me and IBM cloud CTO Mac Devine – as we do a show and tell webinar.

Cloud migration automation; on-board complex enterprise applications

I am always looking for a way to communicate better and cut to the heart of any discussion. So, if you have thoughts on this subject drop me a line at GregO {@} Appzero {dot} com or tweet me @gregoryjoconnor or @appzero_inc.

Register to attend: “Cloud migration: automate on-boarding of complex apps”  Moving production applications to the cloud doesn’t have to take heavy lifting. Join IBM Cloud CTO Mac Devine and AppZero CEO Greg O’Connor as they demonstrate the automation of migrating production applications to any cloud.  Find out how to on-board complex enterprise applications unattended. Join us Thurs, Mar 29th @ 1pm EDT register now>>

What do you call a tool for moving complex enterprise applications to the cloud? That’s what we wanted to know. So we ran a contest, kicking it off at Cloud Expo. (AppZero announces contest to name tool that automates the movement of Windows applications to and from any clouds ) 

First, we had to simply and clearly describe the tool which we did as follows: 

• AppZero's migration tool automatically moves enterprise applications to, from, and amongst clouds without engineering or lock-in. 

Next, we had to put the technology in its market context:

• “As enterprises embrace the cloud for production applications, application mobility and portability stand as either inhibitors or enablers of [adoption].  AppZero is absolutely in the lead with this automation breakthrough.  Let’s find a name that captures the reality as well as the excitement.”

We’d already seen that people have a hard time understanding that the tool works like this:

1. This tool is designed to move applications that have been installed and running, perhaps years ago, with or without any documentation.
2. It automatically moves the application from the source machine to a different target machine. 
3. The tool moves only the application of interest.  It does not move any of the other applications that may also be on the source machine. (… thus making it a perfect extraction and migration tool for Managed Services/Cloud Providers ….)

And we were off to the races. Within a week we had a hundred or so entries; by contest’s end we had just over 200. Quality? All over the map. But surprisingly, there were many sound and thoughtful ideas. We asked, not only for a name, but for the reasoning behind it. Here’s a sampling, (along with my thoughts). Hint: the winner is in this list. See if you can pick out the name we chose.

The "App"-licants

• AppMagic -- because if you can pull this off, it’s magic (We agree – join our beta and give it a try)
• AppMove -- because it best represents what the tool does (as did appMover, and all motion variants)
• Appeeler -- It peels apps from the host :) (‘appeeling’ as this one is, we chose another)
• Apptime -- You save time using this tool. It might bring to memory nap time which is what you will have plenty of if you used the tool (agility= moving an app during lunch time, not days)
• AppSnap -- Move apps in a snap to (and from) the cloud (and it rhymes)

The Cloud Crowd

• Cloudwalker -- The app will go from cloud to cloud (light sabre optional)
• Cloud Hop -- You move from cloud to cloud (… or back to the data center)
• Cloud Care -- Takes care of uploading to the cloud (well, you do have to point and click)
• CloudMerge -- Simple and powerful… brings all clouds together in a simple way (the apps can run unchanged on any cloud, but we don’t actually change the clouds)

The Lone Wolves

• App2Cloud -- It's a simple name that fits in with AppZero concept and tells the user what it is & does ( clever -- both app and cloud)
• Win2cloud -- From Windows to Cloud (Linux beta is coming soon to a cloud near you)
• zApp -- I think that zApp is a very descriptive name for branding and to stand apart from Microsoft and VMware (zapp – the app is in the cloud … to zapp = make enterprise apps moveable)
• Frank -- Frank is a solid name, memorable, catchy and I’d love to hear people talking about "using frank" (What does it say about the folks at AppZero that this entry was on everyone’s short list?)
• SOMO – A soccer mom knows each of her charges; when, where and what they need to bring to perform right (Amen sistah -- I’m married to one)
• APOWSADA "Ah-POW-Sad-Ah" -- Just made the acronym: Automated Packaging Of Windows Server And Desktop Applications (because the world is just a few acronyms short of perfection….loved the phoenetic guide to pronunciation)
• WindFlow -- Apps flow easily from the data center to the cloud - just like a summer wind (the concept is right on, but I think we’ll save this one for the AppZero/Kardashianperfume project)

All kidding aside, I have always been a big fan of creative crowd sourcing and this experience was no exception. The contest was a lot of fun and very helpful. It also gave me a window into understanding how the real world views our product. I like the view. And I appreciate the interest. Thanks to each one of you who took the time to help us out.

The winning name and commercial release are just around the bend, so stay tuned. Till then, we are actively listening to any ideas, suggestions, or use cases. We are still looking for Beta testers to vet, refine and try this tool (Beta test drive here). To see this tool in action, you can watch a video of moving a somewhat simple Wordpress application from the Amazon AWS cloud to the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE).

I am always looking for a way to communicate better and cut to the heart of any discussion. So, if you have thoughts on this subject drop me a line at GregO {@} Appzero {dot} com or tweet me @gregoryjoconnor or us @appzero_inc.  

This week my kids and a bucket of nuts acted out a good allegory for enterprise IT and user cloud provisioning – a cautionary tale. It started with a call from our bank letting us know that our credit card was under suspicion of fraud. Apparently, $134.26 worth of iTunes store activity had been charged to our account in the past 24 hours.  

The bank had correctly guessed that these purchases were news to us, with ‘us’ being the adults in the house. And, if not news to each one of the 5 kids we call ‘ours’, it was also nothing any of them felt like claiming. One family meeting down left us all without a volunteer to claim the shopping spree.

But the truth has a way of finding daylight and the mystery shopper’s identity began to emerge.

Without naming any names here, let’s just say the purchases were made from our (adult) iPad by an application called "Tiny Pets".  Of course, the app is FREE, but apparently a bag of nuts is NOT – a sad fact of life in a world filled with so many hungry tiny pets. So it was that, at $19.99 per bucket of nuts, the free app quickly rang the iTunes debit bell.

Explaining to a 7 year old that the app is “free” but nuts cost money was awkward at best. (Note to parents:  This clever bit of automation is called an ‘in-app purchase’ which, although configurable, is enabled by default.)

Clearly our family had moved to the cloud. But we had done so without giving a thought to any of the ramifications of this move. We had simply moved across the continuum from Cloud what? … to Cloud who? … to what does this mean to me and how do I use it? … to cloud,  uh oh, what now?

Lesson learned: Cloud access from home or the enterprise requires control, visibility and governance.  But I have talked with many organizations where developers regularly bypass IT to jump on AWS, and line-of-business managers grab app instances. They expense the cloud use or back stop their usage with the corporate card. All good?

My story had a happy ending by way of an email from Apple that stated:

I understand that the purchases of Apps were unintentional. In five to seven business days, a credit of $134.26, should be posted to the credit card that appears on the receipt for that purchase. Please note that this is a one-time exception, as the iTunes Store Terms and Conditions state that all sales are final.

Granted, there are not many 7 years olds using the cloud in the enterprise. But I am sure that many companies can tell their own stories about cloud usage that has come off the rails and cost a lot more than planned. Do you think your local cloud provider has an unintended usage refund like Apple?

I am always looking for a way to communicate better and cut to the heart of any discussion. So, if you have thoughts on this subject drop me a line at GregO {@} Appzero {dot} com or tweet me at @gregoryjoconnor

As Occupy Wall Street went global mixing grievance with entitlement, the movement quickly became the melting pot for all things protest-able. Taking to the streets with euros, dollars, and yens taped across their mouths demonstrators marched, camped, and otherwise deplored the unfairness of reality.

“But, who will speak up for production enterprise applications?” I thought.  “The reality is that 99% of production enterprise applications are still earth-bound … not on the cloud. Those greedy, lightweight dev/test use cases are monopolizing the cloud.” 

The paradigm-busting, world-changing Cloud technology is enslaved to the business as usual purposes of low-risk development and test sand boxes. Meanwhile, the blood and guts applications that are the DNA of enterprise productivity languish in the land of roll-your-own IT operations. 

Bring me a tent and set up a porta-potty.  I am heading to the streets with a message:  The cloud is ready for enterprise applications today.  And the enterprise is ready for my cause: Occupy Cloud!

If movement of enterprise applications to the cloud is hampered by:  1) fear of lock-in, and 2) the degree-of-difficulty factor for migrating existing applications, then Occupy Cloud! has a bright and immediate future:

AppZero solves for this set in a single solution. Our migration technology tool automates the encapsulation of a running application into an OS-free Virtual Application Appliance (VAA), which can immediately be copied and run on any machine – physical or virtual. The result is enterprise applications that are free to move from cloud to cloud, as well as to and from data centers. 

Quicker than you can say, “People before profits,” your production application is ready to run on any cloud, with zero lock-in. Occupy Cloud!  Mission accomplished.  No app left behind.

Learn how your enterprise applications can join the empowered 1% at my talk, The Elastic Enterprise: Application Agility Holds Key to Hybrid Clouds . And visit us at Cloud Expo booth 422. 

I am always looking for a way to communicate better and cut to the heart of any discussion. So, if you have thoughts on this subject drop me a line at GregO {@} Appzero {dot} com or tweet me at http://twitter.com/gregoryjoconnor. 

What do a day at the beach and bringing absolutely unique technology to market have in common?  They are two of my favorite things.  Half educator, half evangelist, I spend my days carving out the difference between virtualizing server applications (AppZero) and virtualizing the servers they run on (Hypervisors VA/VM). 

I’ve been here before.  In 2000, I had the opportunity to gather some of the best and brightest people together as I co-founded Sonic Software with Bill Cullen (product brain and Sonic CTO; now AppZero CTO).  At the time, we saw a market-making opportunity to take the AppServer world standards (formal/XML or market driven/Java) and apply them to the EAI market.  The first ESB to market -- Sonic XQ (Xml Queue) -- was shipped in February 2002.  Sonic itself was bought by Progress Software.

In an entrepreneurial act of déjà vu, I’m at Progress Software’s Revolution conference in Boston.   I am struck by the irony of how very much I could have used the technology I now bring to my fellow software executives, who are struggling to balance revolution and cost. 

If you sell software, you’ll appreciate this observation

Growing Sonic Software, we faced two universal hurdles that significantly impacted our business – and that of pretty much everyone who sells software:

1. Winning or losing – labor-intensive demos, proof of concepts (POC), evaluations, and trials had a huge impact on our growth rate
2. Installs that did not go perfectly, resulted in fire drills, lost business,  and a sharp dip in customer confidence

(These facts of software life are some of the acute pain points we solve here at AppZero.)

At Sonic, we were often faced with a 5 day evaluation for a prospect:  1 day to setup our software on their environment, 3 days to do the work they requested, and 1 day show off the results.  When the 1^st day did not go as planned, we always lost.  

Always.  Every single time. No exception.

A cautionary tale:  If you sell software, you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent

Oh, and here’s how I learned that an imperfect install can still bite you long after you have successfully fought to win a customer (in this case a market icon).  A full year after having won the business and implemented our product at the New York Mercantile Exchange, I received a call from the CIO.  He had some new concerns, “Sonic messaging system appears to slow down under load”. 

Arrgggh.  How could this be possible?  Sonic was ahead of its time with elastic scaling, continuous availability, and best in class through put.  This could not be correct.  As it turned out, it wasn’t. 

But determining and fixing the “root cause”  took 6 labor-intensive weeks filled with tons of anxious phone calls, numerous pointing fingers (with chewed fingernails), and a couple of flights to NYC by our top troubleshooter .  Life got very unpleasant before it returned to good.

The culprit? A bug in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Java Runtime Environment  (JRE) that would not do garbage collect (free memory) under load.  Now, long before that fateful phone call, we at Sonic knew all about this issue.  We had documented it, changed our install and packaging to make an easy fix. 

(Cue scary music) But then the customer got involved.  

Someone, somewhere along their line had installed their company’s “certified” version of the JVM/JRE thereby putting our product and reputation at risk.

“It wasn’t my fault” just doesn’t matter.  It took a long time, involving many smart people to find the 2 files that needed to be changed so that all the oil futures in the world could once again flow over the Sonic messaging system.

Morale of the story: Once a customer has your software, things happen.

If I had a time machine, I would bring the AppZero product to my(then)self 

AppZero not only solves the PoC puzzle for software vendors, but protects their Windows and Linux server applications from customers.  We make it possible for applications to be pre-installed, pre-configured and then provisioned onto a physical or virtual OS -- in minutes, perhaps over lunch.  

This capability effectively changes the math around POCs in a big way: we reduce the install, setup and configuration time to zero.  If I had been able to use AppZero at Sonic, I would have freed up a whole day to actually do the customer requests on every single PoC.   What would a 33% increase in productive time have meant?  I’m going to guess a higher win rate against the competition, faster company growth, bigger promotions, and more time spent with the wife and kids.  

And if I had had AppZero at Sonic, our very cool software would have been safely isolated from the customer’s operating environment instead of deeply enmeshed in it.  Innocent from the start.  Hey, how’s this for a new tag line? “AppZero -- protect your software from your customers.” 

I am always looking for a way to communicate better and cut to the heart of any discussion. So, if you have thoughts on this subject drop me a line at GregO {@} Appzero {dot} com or tweet me at http://twitter.com/gregoryjoconnor.