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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. 

Question: Why did the server application cross the network?  Answer: For the same reason the chicken crossed the road – to get to the other side … (in this case) of the datacenter and clouds.

Follow up question:  If all a server application ‘wants’ to do is get to another server – physical or virtual – why would it drag along an OS?  Answer: Because it didn’t know it had a much more agile and faster option – OS-free server application virtualization.

And here we get to the heart of the matter …. Server application virtualization is frequently misunderstood because when they think about virtualization, most people think of:

1. VMs – close cousin to hypervisors; the packaging of server applications with an OS
2. Desktop application virtualization – for desktop applications, not server applications.

In fact, server application virtualization is different in type and kind from these market mates – not better – different.  AppZero does server application virtualization -- well suited for different use cases and requiring a different market lens than the ones formed by either VMs or desktop.

Agility is the benefit that showcases our use case and brings clarity to the discussion.

The basic math of server application virtualization agility over the VM approach is multiplication of results, by subtracting the OS.  When you separate an application from the OS, the resulting image size is 50 – 1,000 times smaller than a VM image, which can easily surpass 30 GB.

So what?

Well, try on this dirty little cloud secret:  If an enterprise uses the Internet to connect to their cloud provider, it will take DAYS to move that 30GB VM image to the cloud.  Yes, days. 

By contrast, AppZero virtual application appliance (VAA) images are most often measured in MB, not GB.  AppZero math means that you can provision your server application to a cloud, or multiple clouds, over lunch instead of days.

Lunch is agile.  Days are not.

I’ll do a deeper dive on server application virtualization in Cloud and ISV use cases in my next few blogs.  But for now, if you want real enterprise application agility, server application virtualization is probably as close as you’ll get to a silver bullet.

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. 

Blink twice and “Can we get a puppy?” becomes “Can I take the car tonight?” Cloud computing took a little longer. By my calculation, it’s taken roughly 8 Cloud Expos to move from “Cloud what?” to “Cloud how?” -- I know because I’ve been at all but the first. So, returning from New York where last week 7,500 people attended the 8^th, I reflected on how much the questions being asked about “the cloud” have changed since the first Cloud Expo in 2008. 

2008 – What is cloud computing?

Translation:  Okay, what is it?  Does ‘The Cloud’ = Amazon Web Services or what?

What are the key capabilities of a cloud? What is AmazonWS?  How is cloud computing different from virtualization?  Self service, pay for what you use, SaaS … are hot topics. Amazon WS does $100M in revenue.

2009 – Is the cloud real?

Translation: Is this something I’m going to have to pay attention to?

Does cloud computing mark a generational epoch on a par with Mainframe, Minis, PC and Web? … or is it a fad that will pass?  Saving money, CapEx vs. OpEx, agility, and ‘why wait on IT?’ are core issues of the day.  AmazonWS does $250M in revenue.

2010 – How do we define the cloud?

Translation:  What’s going to be my best approach to clouding-up my organization?

Every presentation opens with the question: “What is the Cloud?”  Most speakers cite Wikipedia or Nist, others have man-on-the-street videos asking people what cloud computing is. Vendors define it in terms most favorable to their own offerings…. IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, what color is your cloud? Cloud company acquisitions begin.  AmazonWS does $500M in revenue.

2011 – Where do I go from here?

Translation:  How do I make this work?

Many have tried to leverage cloud with mixed results.  Cloud Roadmaps and solution presentation abound in attempts to fast forward through the experience curve, but the devil is in the detail.  Cloud company acquisitions accelerate.  AmazonWS on track to do $1,000M in revenue.

2011 and beyond:  It’s pretty clear that Cloud is the next generational computing epoch, likely to dominate the next decade plus, unless the Mayan calendar turns out to be right. Today, the market is moving from the Wild West to the beginnings of settlement – a time in which companies are building stonewalls to stake their claims.  

IT professionals also have moved past the obvious low hanging fruit of dev/test and brand new apps on to moving existing applications to a cloud. Companies want to be able to install, configure, clone, run and …. then …. move ….. multiple instances of an application unchanged. The reality of Amazon being down for a few days only reinforced the requirement to have multiple copies of any important application ready to go at a moment’s notice.

Mu$ic to my ears. 

I actually had fun manning the booth and walking the floor, telling the AppZero story, which is a great match to this generation of questions: We offer the fastest way to move existing applications to any cloud – letting companies change clouds and workloads to match evolving strategies.  Here’s the flexibility to learn, adopt and change cloud foundation rapidly, without lock-in.  This cloud agility is a differentiator that will separate the winners and losers in many markets.

On that note, now seems like a good time for the next installment of GregO's cloud valuation exit/acquisition score-card

Time             Company                                          Valuation*

Q1 2010        3Tera/CA                                           $90M   @ 30  EV/R(ttm)

Q2 2010        3Para/HP                                            $2.4B   @ 12  EV/R(ttm)

Q1 2011        Facebook/Private IPO (GS)               $50 B   @ 25  EV/R(ttm)

Q1 2011        Terremark/Verizon                             $1.9B   @ 5.4 EV/R(ttm)

Q2 2011        Navisite                                               $230M @ 2.1 EV/R(ttm)

Q2 2011        Savis                                                    $2.9B   @3.0 EV/R(ttm)

 *Valuation – includes debt

EV – Enterprise value or market cap + cash + debt

R(ttm) – Revenue for trailing twelve months

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.