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Platforms

Briefing Notes: Ravello Systems

Krishnan Subramanian · February 25, 2013 · Leave a Comment

This is a briefing note prepared by me on Ravello Systems, a startup focussed on application development in hybrid cloud environment.

Overview: 
Ravello Systems helps migrate your applications from inside the organization’s datacenter to cloud and across the cloud. Ravello’s Cloud Application Hypervisor encapsulates all the virtual machines needed for an application to make the migration seamless. Ravello’s technology can also be used in the application development lifecycle by offering developers a development platform similar to their production environment and seamlessly move the apps from one to another.

To download the briefing note, you need to sign up as a free subscriber. Check out this page for signing up as a free subscriber. Once you sign up for your account and log in, you will see a download link to the briefing note.

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Download Link: https://rishidotver3.wpengine.com/?s2member_file_download=RishidotResearchBriefingNotesRavelloSystems.pdf
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PaaS Pivot: Big Data At The Core Of Platform Services

Krishnan Subramanian · January 17, 2013 · Leave a Comment

As we go into 2013, I keep thinking about the evolution of the Platform as a Service and wonder what is in store for this segment this year. As Platform Services are one of my core focus areas of research, I thought I will start off this year with a post on this topic. For the past year or so, I have been advocating the need to rethink PaaS offerings in order to fully take advantage of the big data paradigm. I use the term Intelligent Platforms to describe next generation platform services built around big data. In my opinion, we are going to see a pivot in the PaaS market where the focus will shift from the application development platforms focussed on scaling users and meeting the resource demands of large loads to building a robust platform to take advantage of vast amounts of data organizations have or going to acquire in the future.

Intelligent Apps Ver 1

Historically, platform as a service offerings were focussed on modern web applications that handle “smaller quantities” of data. In some cases, PaaS was used for applications that handle (or make use of) large volumes of data. But, in my opinion, most of these applications on these platforms were just scratching the surface. In reality, the PaaS offerings were not built to meet the needs of data hungry organizations. In 2012, PaaS vendors understood the changing needs of enterprises and were slowly starting to focus on the big data use cases. At the same time, we also saw the emergence of big data applications which were built on top of big data infrastructure platforms like Hadoop. As enterprises understand the full impact of big data and start building apps to take advantage of data (collected across the length and breadth of these organizations), they will really feel the need for more sophisticated platform services that run on top of big data infrastructure.

Vendors like Continuuity are trying to attack this problem. VMware’s CloudFoundry spinoff seems to be heading in this direction. In 2013, we are going to see the emergence of more such players and we will also see most of the existing PaaS vendor take steps to boost their platform services so that they are capable of supporting big data applications. Keep in mind that whatever we have seen so far with regards to “big data applications” are mostly focussed on analytics and visualization. What we are going to see in the future are set of services built on top of Intelligent Platforms that will go beyond simple analytics. We are going to see applications (services) that are self evolving and which can tweak itself based on the insights gleaned from various data sources (including the data these applications themselves produce). The underlying platform services needed to support such sophisticated services are going to be much more complex underneath than what we are seeing among the PaaS vendors today.

In short, 2013 will be the year when platform vendors are moving towards building platform services suitable for intelligent self evolving applications (services) of the future. All these services are going to be centered around data. Not just business and governments but the entire human society is going to rely on the data driven services with unprecedented complexity and automation underneath. The key for any vendor in the space is to build Intelligent Platforms that mask all these complexities and offer a simple interface for developers.

PS: The image in the blog post was a simplistic diagram I put forward to highlight the evolution from the current generation of PaaS to the next gen Intelligent Platforms.

Open Conversations: Platforms For The Services World

Krishnan Subramanian · August 27, 2012 · Leave a Comment

In the next episode of Open Conversations, we are going to discuss with Adam Seligman of Salesforce.com on where the platform market is heading as we move into a more services oriented future. In this discussion, we will discuss the platforms market in general and Salesforce’s strategy to meet the demands. We will then talk about where the market is evolving in the coming decade. We will talk about what developers should be focussing as we move into a services based world. It is going to be an interesting discussion about the future of platforms.

What: Open Conversations: Platforms For The Services World

When: 6th September 2012 (Tuesday) at 1:00 PM PST

Where: Rishidot Youtube Channel

Who: Krishnan Subramanian (Rishidot Research), Adron Hall (Composite Code / Tier 3) and Adam Seligman (Salesforce)

Please join us on the discussion and use #openconvo as the hashtag to ask any questions.

Service Providers and PaaS

Krishnan Subramanian · August 3, 2012 · Leave a Comment

Image Credit: Scaleextreme

As I push the themes of federated clouds and paas as the future of cloud services hard, people always question me about how these two seemingly disparate themes reconcile and how can I tie up different, seemingly, loose ends in my model. I will one day dust off my laziness and write about the big picture model I have in my mind but, for now, I want to point towards a trend that clearly ties down these two seemingly disparate themes I have been promoting these two themes in this blog for well over two years now. Federated Clouds is about the proliferation of cloud service providers in the market, aided by the availability of cloud infrastructure platforms like vCloud, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc.. If PaaS is going to be where the action is in the future, how are they going to survive another market disruption as they are trying to slowly get a piece of pie in the market after cloud computing disrupted their traditional hosting model?

One of the trends started by a startup in the cloud infrastructure space, Tier 3, is to take a two pronged approach offering both Infrastructure Services and Platform Services. They understood that even though PaaS is going to be the future where most of the IT action will be, infrastructure services are still going to be needed for enterprises for a long time to come. By offering both, it will be easy for them to offer customers a chance to migrate easily to the platform layer down the lane. They built their PaaS tier using CloudFoundry which, by the way, is a great framework for not only enabling service providers build their own PaaS but also large enterprises building their own vertical PaaS. The latter part was highlighted by Jonathan Murray, CTO of Warner Music group, in his keynote at DeployCon 2012. Expect to see more and more service providers take advantage of CloudFoundry for their PaaS offering in the coming years.

However, it is not just the startups with cloud in their DNA who are part of this trend. I have been talking to many service providers off the record and they are seriously considering this two pronged strategy going forward. They realize that infrastructure services business is an absolute must for their short term strategy. But, if they don’t get their act straight on the PaaS front, they will be forced to play a catch up game again when the market gets disrupted by PaaS. Cumulogic, a private PaaS provider who started off with a Java focus, is moving in that direction with full force. Contegix, the St. Louis based cloud service provider, is using Cumulogic’s platform for their PaaS offering. Recently, Cumulogic went GA adding some critical features needed to compete hard in the market like High Availability, Polyglot, etc.. They are positioning themselves as an alternative to CloudFoundry. Even though their offering is a proprietary offering compared to CloudFoundry, they are confident that people worried about VMware’s intentions will select their PaaS over CloudFoundry. More interestingly, I am impressed with their business models for service providers which I think will go a long way in luring smaller and regional providers. I am expecting to see more and more service providers embrace Cumulogic platform to compete in the PaaS market.

Does a federated ecosystem of cloud providers (both infrastructure and platforms) help organizations in any way other than adding chaos?

At the outset, especially for those used to the economics of scarcity, it will appear insane as they expect a market consolidation towards handful of providers. But for others who understand the economics of abundance and how innovation happens at higher layers while commoditization is happening at lower levels, this is no brainer. If you want to understand this concept of innovation happening at higher levels as the forces of commoditization permeate at the lower levels, I strongly urge you to follow the work of LEF researcher, and all round brilliant man, Simon Wardley. Even though I disagree with some of his interpretations of the market, his conceptual ideas are on strong footing and will help any organization understand market disruption and stay ahead of competition. Having said that I expect a federated ecosystem of cloud providers to emerge in spite of the waves of commoditization at the infrastructure and platform levels. I believe in this because, unlike in other utility market, the computing needs of the organizations cannot be standardized anytime soon with a more global market place with diverse needs and regulatory regimes coming into picture. One of the many trends I expect to happen on top of this commoditized federated ecosystem is innovations helping organizations search and discover the right compute resources for their needs. Klint Finley of TechCrunch calls this App Store for platforms. However, this trend to innovate at higher levels has been there in the infrastructure space for quite some time with offerings like Zimory, SpotCloud, Equinix, ComputeNext, etc.. On the PaaS side, we have companies like AppFog, CollabNet and AppSecute attempting to do the same. I also expect ServiceMesh to fit into the same category but their focus right now is a bit different. I don’t see why they cannot pivot into this direction eventually. There are few others companies which will eventually come into this competition and I cannot talk about them now for NDA reasons.

These innovative companies are going to add layers on top of a federated ecosystem of infrastructure and platform services, offering a seamless experience to end users (which in most of the cases will be developers). The innovation that is going to happen on top of these commoditized but federated infrastructure and platform services is going to define the market in the coming years. We are going to see startups (and in some cases established companies disrupting themselves) emerge in this space offering a more unified and seamless user experience to developers and changing the face of IT once and for all. While we get ecstatic about these potential innovations, we need to keep in mind that today’s enterprises are still not fully convinced about cloud infrastructure. The next decade will see pundits (including myself) breaking their heads over how to bridge the gap between main street IT and Silicon Valley IT.

PS: Some of the companies I have listed above may not exist in the market or may have screwed up their execution. I have listed them to show how people innovate at higher layers while commoditization happens underneath.

Disclosure: Tier 3 is a client of Rishidot Research and a sponsor of DeployCon 2012. CloudFoundry and Cumulogic were sponsors of DeployCon 2012. Equinix is a client of GigaOm Pro Analyst Network (which I am part of for the time being).

This post was originally posted on CloudAve.

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