…by providing an SDK and a set of high-level APIs that sits on top of a fabric layer that connects all the different big data components in an optimal way – they’re delivering on the promise of making big data accessible to all.

Just as a reminder, Continuuity delivers a so-called “Big Data application fabric”, that aims to make it fast and easy for any developer to build, deploy, scale and manage Big Data apps. The platform offers a unified experience across the entire application lifecycle from development to DevOps. Continuuity provides pre-packaged building blocks with higher level APIs, Datasets, tooling and documentation that speed the big data application development process. The founders see four specific use cases for the Continuuity platform:

• Getting data in – event ingestion, data queuing and a core transaction engine
• A more traditional PaaS view of application containers- developers write code, package it up and deploy
• Ready established datasets – collections of data, stored down in the infrastructure with a higher level API. Continuuity provides some data aligned with common patterns in apps – time series, counters etc
• Data out- queries, via RESTful APIs and utilizing both preconfigured and self-built user stored procedures

Well after a few months in private beta, Continuuity is rolling out a public beta of both the developer suite and the developer sandbox. Specific parts of the news today are:

• Moving out of Private Beta to Public Beta of Developer Suite
  • Single node version of the Continuuity AppFabric
  • SDK
  • IDE plugins
  • Dataset Patterns to make data modeling and manipulation easy
  • Test harness
• Introducing the Public Beta of the Developer Sandbox
  • Free access to a self-service, cloud based, single tenant, single node version of the Continuuity AppFabric
  • Trial period of 90 days
  • 8 cores, 8GB of memory and 240GB of storage
• Combination of releasing these both to public beta together allows developers to have the full end-to-end Continuuity experience
• VPC and On-Prem are in Private Beta

To really get an idea of the sort of outcomes that Continuuity is delivering customers, I quizzed CEO Todd Papaioannou about an interesting case study from one of the private beta testers. The customer, which runs a social commerce platform, wanted to deliver targeted recommendations and personalization for users visiting their Web properties. They wanted to process events in real time from a variety of different data sources including all activity on their site (user clickstream, seller actions) as well as additional information about their users pulled from the Facebook API. These events, combined with their proprietary customer segmentation algorithms, allowed them to generate personalized per-user product recommendations and then use them at serving time by making queries directly into the Continuuity AppFabric.

Continuuity is providing a very interesting platform, and one which the current preoccupation with big data from all vendors will get a fair amount of attention – I’m looking forward to seeing some case studies from the public beta.

The company’s new architecture is being integrated into Engine Yard Cloud. The idea behind the new approach, is that developers will be able to more easily choose components and services offered by Engine Yard or include their own. In a pre-emptive strike against Heroku who, despite indications is yet to introduce hosting beyond Amazon Web services, Engine Yard’s multi-infrastructure support will allow developers to comparison shop for resources and select their preferred infrastructure provider in the future. In a following move to many Cloud Foundry players, developers also will be able to deploy in a public, private or hybrid cloud Finally this release see Engine Yard customers have access to an increasing variety of languages, operating systems, databases and more.

So – to specific functionality, this new release includes:

• Cluster model – developers can create purpose-built clusters for faster provisioning, configuration and deployment. Developers can currently run database clusters, and in the future, they will be able to deploy clusters of application and utility processes; clusters within an environment can be spread across multiple regions for disaster recovery
• Infrastructure abstraction – with an infrastructure abstraction layer now in place, developers will benefit from an increasing number of IaaS provider options in the future, as well as options for running on hybrid and private clouds
• Monitoring and Alerting – an automatic monitoring and alerting agent is now included with all new Engine Yard Cloud deployments. The new monitoring capabilities provide incident data on applications, components and other processes running on a developer’s virtual machine. In addition, alerts and monitoring information is available for virtual resources in the infrastructure, including CPU, memory and disk
• A new dynamic User Interface – the new UI provides a structured experience that helps developers build a stable architecture, as well as adapt to their growing resource needs
• New Blueprint Approach – three new blueprints allow developers to standardize their application environments using Engine Yard proven best practices. The new predefined blueprints give developers the flexibility to choose the size of their environments as well as add or remove clusters from an environment or components from clusters

MyPOV

More choice, more flexibility, more control – what’s not to like? At face value this should be a move which sees Engine Yard claw back recognition. The reality however is more nuanced than that – mind share and market attention go a long way to helping customers make their buying decisions, and Engine Yard is up against the might of Salesforce (pushing Heroku as the PaaS of choice) and the huge ecosystem forming behind Cloud Foundry. That said, Engine Yard does have a small but loyal following and their recent funding from Oracle should, so long as they make the right decisions, see them gain awareness in the larger enterprises that form Oracle’s customer base.

Beyond the softer measures of market success however are some bottom line issues – going by these, this release is a very strong move for Engine Yard. Enterprises are looking to platforms that meet their needs in terms of infrastructure and, more and more, this means that private or hybrid cloud are an important piece of the puzzle. likewise, despite enterprises being attracted to the PaaS story of “abstracting infrastructure away from the customer”, enterprises are still uncomfortable with not having fine grained control of their architecture and components – it’s a sensitive balancing act, ensuring automation and abstraction while still allowing for control. Time will tell whether Engine Yard have found the ideal balance point between these conflicting drivers. For more on the discussion of these two conflicting aims, see the excellent discussion about composable versus contextual systems by James Urquhart.

FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, today announced record results for calendar year 2012.  Within one year, FinancialForce.com increased annual revenue run rate by more than 90 percent, from 9 million in 2011 to 17 million in 2012, significantly expanding their customer base in Accounting, Professional Services, Billing and Media. Additionally, the number of customers using both Accounting and Professional Services Automation (PSA) grew by 120%.  Finally, 2012 also saw the expansion of FinancialForce.com’s enterprise customer base as average contract value rose by a significant percentage. 90% of the company’s growth is due to larger deal sizes.

The company also expanded its staff globally by 60%, across the United States, United Kingdom and Spain.  As cloud spending continues to be a top priority for CFOs and CIOs, FinancialForce.com is poised for aggressive growth again in 2013 and projects more than 100 new hires across the globe to keep up with its rate of growth.

Update – apparently it was an incorrect statement in the Financial Force statement about 90% of growth coming from larger deal sizes. Something to do with misinterpreted statistics.

The mid market is one that is very underserved by cloud accounting/financial vendors – NetSuite used to play in this space but is rapidly moving up the food chain leaving FinancialForce and Intacct to scrap over the mid sized customer base. These results are indication that there is an appetite in the marketplace for midsized organization to move to the cloud It’s also interesting to see that even FinancialForce is seeing a move to larger organizations as larger deal-sizes become more prevalent.

As expected, FinancialForce is enjoying the network effects of having customers using both financial and professional services automation products – and I’d expect this trend to continue – I’d also expect the company to add additional services that further increase the network effects of discrete, but closely integrated solutions.

You see, depending on your perspective, the fact that cloud computing means that technology is democratized and available to all is either the best thing ever, or the worst thing ever. For business units it’s great – it gives them the ability to acquire technology without going through the often long and torturous process with IT. For IT and CFOs, however, technology democratization is painful – it means they lose control and visibility over what people are using and what costs are being incurred by the company. That can result in some big surprises at the end of the month, quarter or financial year.

It was awesome then to talk with Tyler Sloat, CEO of subscription and billing vendor Zuora, and Mat Ellis, CEO of cloud spend management company Cloudability (disclosure, I’m an investor in Cloudability) to get their perspectives on this cloud cost conundrum.

We started off by setting a little bit of context: I detailed exactly why I believe the cloud is a revolution rather than an evolutionary step for technology, and why the democratization that cloud produces is both a positive and a problematic thing for organizations. We talked about the balance that organizations strive to find between control (for IT, the CFO and the C-suite generally) and agility.

Some questions we talked about included:

• Why is cloud cost so complex?
• What is the CFO perspective on how you think about this problem?

Finally, we talked about specific ideas for solving the problem – Mat Ellis set out a four-step cycle of continuous improvement when it comes to managing cloud cost issues:

1. Tell finance to categorize cloud expenditure in a special place to keep an eye on it.
2. Obtain a cloud cost management solution to avoid any surprises.
3. Review costs. Ask questions (Can we do more with less?). Optimize.
4. Hold people accountable for their spending.

It was an interesting discussion that revolved around an important, but often ignored, issue. You can check out the replay below.

Of course this sort of rogue IT isn’t ideal – it means that a huge number of different solutions are in use within the organization, that costs can spiral out of control and that no due-diligence has occurred as to the security, reliability and robustness of the solutions being used. But what is a business to do? Historically, getting servers deployed takes weeks because of interminable processes. Software evaluations may take a few days from the business end but then get bogged down in weeks of security and compliance checks by IT. It doesn’t meet the needs of the business who every day are being pressured to do more, for less.

But let’s look at it from IT’s perspective for a moment. They’re tasked with ensuring that all the various pieces of technology within an organization work within some security constraints. They’re responsible for ensuring that data, the most valuable thing an organization has, stays in its rightful place, and finally they’re busy making sure the organization gets the best bang for its buck – having dozens of individual business units sign up for different cloud services is, in their mind at least, risky, expensive and tantamount to an invitation to data loss.

Perhaps the time has come to not look at this as such a binary conversation – after all these two groups, IT and the business, aren’t exactly at war. IT wants to enable the business to meet its objectives. True it can be a little abrasive in its approach (hey, IT staff tend to be generalized as not having a high degree of social skills after all) but fundamentally it aims to deliver the solutions the business needs, to help the business achieve its strategic outcomes and all the while deliver these solutions in a way that doesn’t put the business at risk. IT is about safety first, and deliver second.

The business shares many of these objectives. After all no business unit wants to do anything that puts the organization at risk, they don’t want to introduce a vector for data loss, nor do they want to increase the cost burden on their organization. What they do want to do is achieve their business aims as quickly, and easily, as possible. If we had to characterize them as a class, we’d say that the business unit is all about delivery first, and safety second.

Building a Bridge

So how would it look if we took these two groups – IT with it’s security first and delivery second approach – and the business unit, with its delivery first and security second approach, and gave them solutions that allowed both of them to meet their objectives, but in a way that also delivered the priority seen as most important to the group on the other side of the chasm. In other words, how do we enable IT to deliver solutions in an agile manner, happy in the knowledge that they are inherently secure? And how do we enable the business to choose inherently secure solutions, happy in the knowledge that they’ll be delivered in an agile way?

Of course the industry is partially to blame for the existence of this chasm between the two groups. Traditional vendors, those selling directly to IT, have been quick to articulate at great length and in no uncertain terms just how much of a threat this new generation of cloud tools poses to the organization. The traditional diet of fear, uncertainty and doubt has consisted of a million and one thinly veiled messages telling enterprise that by enabling business unit self-provisioning they open themselves up to mass risk.

And the new breed of vendors have also had some guilt to shoulder. Rather than encourage a positive relationship between IT and the business, they have been quick to pour scorn on IT’s very ability to deliver, its awareness of how social, mobile and cloud are fundamentally changing the needs the business has. These new vendors, in an effort to encourage the very rogue IT that corporate IT is worried about, have presented a black and white choice where businesses have little option but to acquire solutions by subterfuge in order to achieve their aims.

A Third Way

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. A new generation of vendors are coming on line who realize that in order to build viable and sustainable businesses they need to find a message and a delivery mechanism that allows both sides of the debate – IT and the business – to achieve its objectives without undermining the objectives of the other side. Vendors who realize that business self-service can happen in a way that is sympathetic to IT’s need for governance, security, visibility over cost and integration with legacy systems. Vendors who understand that IT-centric tools can also be built in such a way as to enable the business to gain a degree of autonomy over their day to day operations.

Some good examples exist – companies like enStratus are allowing enterprise IT to deliver their businesses a self-service portal to manage their cloud infrastructure. This is done with the buy-in and approval of IT, who are happy that their important requirements around governance and control are maintained. Cloudability are helping enterprises to gain insight into their overall cloud spend so that the financial and budgetary requirements of the organization can be met without reducing business units’ ability to self-determine. And here at Appsecute we’re creating a bridge whereby individual developers and teams of developers have the autonomy to use the tools that best suit their particular objectives, but to do so in a way that gives central IT visibility and audit control over what they’re doing.

The future has to be one in which the massive tensions that exist between IT and the business unit are resolved – companies that find ways to meet the needs of both sides of the divide help to move the discussion from one of risks, problems and barriers to one of rewards, benefits and outcomes.

Here’s part two… (and if you haven’t seen it, part one is here)

Gathering Clouds: How do you see not only the provider landscape, but the cloud landscape from a technology perspective changing over the next few years?

Ben Kepes: So that’s a difficult one, when you consider that we didn’t have Amazon Web Services little more than five years ago. It’s hard to kind of crystal ball gaze in terms of what’s coming. I think that cloud adoption will only continue to grow. That’s fairly obvious. I think that a lot of the barriers to entry, things like security and overall IT resistance will change. I think more and more people will be moving up the stack, and PaaS will really ascend over the next few years as infrastructure becomes a little commoditized. I think we will see some mega-vendors break out in the platform space. I think it’s fairly obvious that Salesforce will become the new Oracle, for example. But at the same time, we’ll see companies like Oracle and Microsoft start to win in the cloud, whether that’s by acquisition or development — who knows.

GC: Where is innovation happening and how is it happening and who’s driving it?

BK: Innovation’s happening everywhere. I think that there’s a lot of innovation happening in the platform space. I’ve been really excited by things Cloud Foundry has been doing. I think more broadly in terms of not so much organizations but more where I see opportunities, I’m really excited by solutions that straddle a broad range of different services. My theory, or my thesis, is that over time, organizations will use more and more discrete and disparate services from different vendors, and so if I can straddle as many of those in my mind is a good bet. So I’m really bullish about companies, for example, like Twilio, that are doing voice APIs over a broad range of applications. Similarly I’m excited about companies like the API management companies, cloud management companies like enStratus and RightScale. Anyone that straddles a bunch of different services, and helps to bring some clarity across that breadth is in a good space I believe.

GC: Amongst the companies that are leading the charge from a technology perspective, where do you see collaboration happening, and what new opportunities is that collaboration creating?

BK: Sure. So you know, obviously OpenStack is a pretty amazing infrastructure initiative where you got 200 vendors getting together for what, for their own betterment, for sure, but for the betterment of the community, so that’s really exciting. I think service providers, we’re seeing some interesting things in terms of large service providers, the likes of telcos and banks like this, doing a bit of sort of service aggregation, whether that’s applications or whether that’s some storage or infrastructure. I think we’ll see some interesting plays in terms of that aggregation moving forward.

GC: On open source, do you believe that it’s a way to improve the promise or even the premise of what cloud could be, or is it really just establishing a broader or more standardized status quo?

BK: I think its changing things. I believe that open source lowers barriers to entry. It increases innovation because there aren’t commercial barriers to innovation occurring. As an extension of that, open source is different actually; it’s significantly changed the landscape. Not only because of the obvious reasons: because you have an open competitor, in the formerly proprietary space, but also because you have innovation built on top of that open source platform.

GC: Looking more broadly at the major players in the space, both providers and then the companies actually developing the technology: who’s doing it right and who’s doing it wrong?

BK: I think it’s a nascent space so it’s hard to say who is doing things right, given that we don’t really know because we’re all new at this. I would say that anyone that’s cloud-washing (NOTE: To read an insightful article on Forbes regarding Logicworks CEO Ken Ziegler’s perspective on cloud-washing, click here), anyone who’s taking a regular product and calling it cloud is doing it wrong. I’d say that anyone that’s trying to increase lock-in is doing it wrong. Anyone that’s not building solutions with open APIs is doing it wrong. Anyone that’s not enabling broad browser-based mobile access is doing it wrong. So there’s a few kind of general statements in there, but overall it’s too early to say specifically which vendor has it particularly wrong.

GC: Thinking about the prevalence of tech-empowered start-ups all over the world, from London to U.S. cities like Boston, Austin and New York, to Asia, Australia and New Zealand: has the way the economy has been trending over the past decade pushed people to start being smarter about how they approach creating a business and, in so doing, move people closer to the cloud? Is that why we’ve seen such a big boom over the last four years?

BK: Yeah, absolutely. I think what we’re seeing is a real convergence in that cloud is an enabler. You’ve seen convergence around organizations’ desire or demand or need for agility, around generational changes, with millenials coming through, and the use of lightweight, agile tools. We’ve moved to ubiquitous mobile access, project specific tech. All these things are kind of converging together. And the technologies that cloud delivers answer those needs and on the expectations. Michael Andreeson famously discussed the “software-ization of the world.” We’ve seen a kind of move from sort of monolithic organizations to much smaller, more refined organizations, and the software startup is sort of the epitome of that change.

GC: What are your views with regard to mobile and cloud, how those two are coming together, where they’re overlapping and interacting, and how they can come together more cohesively in the future.

BK: So I think that part of the difficulty is around the use of marketing words here. Mobile is a pretty simple concept, but we’re using it in different ways throughout cloud. I think clearly that cloud enables mobile access of data. It’s absolutely central to the demands of a mobile workforce. So yes, more and more, people will see that cloud, which obviously is a really broad term, but cloud and its broader guise is going to be an enabler of a mobile workforce. So yeah, I think more and more, those two terms will come together, but clearly in many situations where marketing terms are being bandied around, regardless of whether they are applicable or not.

GC: Right. Are there any companies that you see that are really putting the two technology paradigms closer together in a holistic and smart way?

BK: Sure. Salesforce has Dreamforce next week [at the time of this interview] in San Francisco and they will be announcing some changes that very much deliver the mobile cloud promise. Other companies like Box for example, who is doing a great job of taking content from the clouds and delivering it across mobile platforms. At the software layer, there’s a lot of stuff going on that, which really converges and improves those two things. And it’s most applicable and I think it’s most obvious at the software level versus the infrastructure or platform level. How many people actually want to have virtualization available on mobile or deploy their apps via mobile device?

GC: So earlier in the conversation, you had talked about sort of your view of platform-as-a-service and SaaS really leading the charge, and infrastructure-as-a-service being something that has grown quite considerably in the past, but will not necessarily continue as predominantly in the future. But after SaaS, after PaaS, and after IaaS, what’s the next phase that you anticipate cloud moving toward?

BK: I’m looking forward to when we don’t talk about how cloud is a specific thing anymore, just kind of there, in the same way we don’t talk about our cell phone delivery networks as such, we just use the devices. So I think we’ll get to that point. In terms of what’s the next big area or the next big acronym, and I wouldn’t put an acronym to it, but it will be the kind of platform, where previously separate areas are glued together from across the stack and up and down the stack of the next big area is something Whether it will be parallel to IaaS or PaaS, I don’t really know because I don’t really buy those terms. But I think integration and aggregation services more generally are going be the next kind of area to rise.

GC: As cloud has gained a visible presence within the echo chamber that is IT publications, there seems to be a similar rise in the amount of discussion around big data as it relates to cloud. I was wondering if you could share your perspectives on that.

BK: There are an exponentially growing number of connected devices. And with the rise of the internet and the parallel development of inanimate devices being able to talk to the internet, there is much more data than ever before.  Deriving some meaning or some sense from that data is going to be an opportunity as well as a big problem area.  So the whole concept around big data is totally valid. Actually I get multiple pitches every day, and most of them have some big data as part of the underlying business model. But often regardless of whether the solution being described has anything to do with big data or not. So it’s definitely the buzz word du jour. So like with cloud, people are jumping on the word and just throwing it around because they feel they need to check that box.

GC: Does cloud enable that conversation and that particular buzz word though, more readily five years ago when you’d have to have a giant Oracle database to crunch that large scale data? I mean, cloud enabled people to use Hadoop, so it’s giving a whole range of businesses access to this tool that wouldn’t have previously been able to leverage it.

BK: So I think cloud enables people to get insight into their world and connect with their world. One of those insights, one of those connections is through the use of big data. So yes, cloud is an enabler for big data and the value it can provide a company.

GC: What is the industry going to look like two years, out and then five years from now? What are you seeing?

BK: Sure. So I mean, obviously Bill Gates famously said that we over estimate what we can achieve in the short term and under estimate what we may achieve in the long term.

I think he’s right. In two years’ time we will still be arguing about public versus private, cloud-washing, open-washing and green-washing and all those sorts of things. So the conversations will be similar, though there will be a much higher rate of adoption, and there will be a bunch more solutions.

Five or ten years’ time, I think we’re talking some serious differences. Because at that point, we will actually see some turnover in terms of contemporary IT staff moving on and a new generation of IT leaders coming in. We’ll see the sun-setting of a lot of legacy technologies in favor of new products much advanced beyond where they are today. So I think five to ten years forward at the very minimum everyone will be using virtualization, but moving forward more and more workloads will be in the public cloud, and the public cloud is available on a granular basis. There will be lots of differentiation on service at different levels. I hope in five to ten years’ time the term “cloud” has kind of dissipated. We are using the cloud and doing the cloud, so the word should similarly be increasingly irrelevant.

GC: I’m particularly interested in your views on the public, private, and hybrid cloud debate. they are the three primary buckets of cloud being sold now, but will this change? It seems to me that a lot of innovation is occurring at the public cloud level, but there’s a lot more publicly being stated about the public cloud and its virtues and its problems than there is about the private or hybrid versions. Are they going to remain in those silos? Or are they going change?

BK: I think they’re going to change. And you’re right, I mean, clearly public by definition more public, so there’s more attention there. But I think there’s going be a convergence because people are going to be less dogmatic about “one ring to rule them all,” so to speak. More organizations will have a real hybrid strategy, where they’ll be doing some stuff in the public cloud, they’ll be having their own private cloud, they’ll probably have a virtual private cloud  with a third-party vendor, as well as some stuff at traditional on-premise. But the future is very heterogeneous, and I think that’s only going increase.

GC: What is missing in the cloud industry, both on the manage service provider side, and also on the technology development side?

BK: I think we’re missing a real level of pragmatism. We’re at a stage in this industry where the competition’s being driven by marketing and being driven by dogma. What we’re electing through this lack of pragmatism is simple use. Instead we should be standing back and looking at whether what we are framing is the right solution. Ultimately we need to understand and accept that one flavor isn’t right for all kinds of customers and prospects.

Not being a developer – my comments come from a business perspective. That might be anathema to most developer purists, but I sense that what we’re seeing with high level PaaS’ like force.com (and, for that matter, the other SaaS-based highly flexible platforms, is an uber-democratization of development that will prove even more revolutionary for developers and business than IaaS has been for operational teams within an IT organization. That’s the reason I started differentiating application PaaS (aPaaS) from infrastructure PaaS (iPaaS)

Let’s see how that works. With cloud, organizations no longer need to think about procuring, racking and stacking servers. Rather they obtain their server needs on a utility basis from a cloud provider (in the case of the public cloud at least). CapEx is removed, the need for large operational teams goes, and all of a sudden the ability to acquire server time moves from central IT, down to tech teams within a business unit. All fine and good so far, but let’s get to the next stage, PaaS.

In the old days, a business that wanted to, for instance, create a custom application that integrated with its ERP or CRM, would have needed to engage a developer with a deep understanding of both development languages and the hooks into the software package being integrated with. With aPaaS that is no longer the case. The platform itself is built upon the application and hence is already integrated with the core data the organization is trying to use. The language is easy enough for most business people to use and hence they do, creating applications at will.

This concept, of aPaaS being the catalyst for massive democratization, was well articulated in a recent post that went out on a significant limb by saying that “Force.com is the next Visual Basic”. Rather than an insult however, the author stresses that reactions to force.com replay many of the those that went alongside the introduction of VB a couple of decades ago:

• Most professional C++ programmers dismissed it. VB was a “toy language” or a “glue language” for components – not for serious software development.
• Increasing number of software engineers embraced the language because, to put it simply, when it came to desktop applications you could be an order of magnitude more productive in VB than in C++. It may not have had the stature and features of a “real” professional language, but it sure was profitable to work in it.
• VB was easy enough for anyone to use, so everyone did. Doctors, lawyers, students – millions of VB developers sprang up out of nowhere and wrote a lot of code. Much of it was very bad code, but that’s what happens when a bunch of amateurs get in the game. Entire book, magazine and training industries grew up to help them get better, and many of them did and built entire careers around the platform.

The very reason VB was productive is important to remember in light of the rise of PaaS generally and these high level aPaaS’ in particular. The original post detailed the traits that force.com shows that were so starkly on display at this year’s DreamForce:

• A web based GUI environment that provides a high level of abstraction for developing real applications that seamlessly integrate core features like database, email, reporting, the web, chat and mobile.
• An environment that lets you do a great deal without code, but provides the language and “hooks” that allow serious programmers to go much farther.
• A flood of non-programmers who are using the environment to solve real problems, and who are stumbling into actual programming.
• Lots of truly awful code being written, so there’s a huge need for training and a thirst for knowledge on how to do things correctly.
• A language and platform that doesn’t seem to get much respect from the “real” programmers doing Java, C# or other languages, even though the demand (and pay) for Force.com and Apex programmers is huge.

It is true that, just like VB being under powered for some applications and needing a product like .NET to fill the gaps for particular needs, so too does force.com have its limitations. We’re always going to see “real” developers do the complex stuff – just look at the amazing number of applications being built of Heroku, AppFog, EngineYard et al – but that’s not the key point here. The key point is that the number of people globally who are now developing applications is ballooning, while the number of so called “professional” developers remains fairly stagnant. The thing that allows this to occur is a democratization, an increasing utility and, yes, a return to the simplicity of the Visual Basic days. It may not be a “real” development tool, but it’s one that is changing the very essence of what development is.

A new startup out of Australia is looking to attack those perceptions head-on. Sentinus is a consulting company that specializes on short engagements helping to plan and review the security around cloud projects. It’s a high growth area – the success of new age consulting companies like Appirio shows that despite cloud being a key driver to self-service and end-user adoption – there is still a significant opportunity to add value in helping with the process.

Anyway – as part of their launch Sentinus developed the Sentinus Toolkit, a document which helps organizations with standards assessment, best practice guidelines and vendor selection when moving to the cloud. The toolkit is designed to help an organization find a cloud vendor they can trust. It uses best-practice in cloud security, service quality and architecture to expose hidden weaknesses.

Sentinus actually has a number of downloads which help organizations assess and review their readiness and their vendor’s suitability for purpose. One of these is the Sentinus 80 point safety check that goes through a bunch of different measures: features, service, policy architecture etc, to help customers get a rough assessment of a prospective supplier.

The rationale for what they’re doing (beyond, of course, gaining a bit of attention) is simple. Says Damian Bramanis, the Sentinus Director of Advisory Services;

We’re seeing a wealth of choices in cloud services, it’s like visiting a supermarket. The difference is, at the supermarket we’re protected with standards for food quality and labeling, but in the cloud it’s far too easy to end up with a rotten egg.

I have to say that much of what Sentinus is trying to do would be well delivered by an independent code of practice. As an aside I was heavily involved in creating what was the first of this kind of national codes of practice when a group of people, backed by a local industry watchdog and with buy-in from a number of vendors, created the New Zealand Cloud Computing Code of Practice.

I like the guides that Sentinus has developed, and having their content will only help to educate the market at large, I would say however that these sort of things are sometimes best delivered in a vendor neutral way and it would be great to see the Australian industry develop or adopt a broad CoP for themselves.

My background and entry into the technology industry came from my experience wrangling tech for a number of different small and mid-sized businesses. I’ve seen first hand just how much work is involved in tailoring discrete solutions into something that actually meets the specific needs of the business. This is even more difficult for resource constrained small businesses that lack the cash and IT skills of enterprise.

As we move into the cloud-dominated world, the issue of integration is made more prominent as enterprises realize just how many different systems are being used throughout their organizations. While one of the best things about cloud is the widespread democratization of technology, this is also one of the most problematic areas. All of a sudden, managers and IT staff are scratching their heads about how to reconcile the issues created by business units having to interact with many software solutions from a ton of different vendors.

It’s for this reason that when Paul Miller and I started talking about content for the upcoming CloudBeat conference, that integration and the cloud was one of the areas we wanted to focus on. But my take on integration is even wider than simply “stitching together a

True application integration, in its purest sense, is one angle that needs to be seriously analyzed. There are many companies trying to solve this conundrum — from working out how to integrate the data and processes of businesses using both QuickBooks and Salesforce to pre-packaging “bundles” of software for specific verticals and selling them as a package. Companies like SnapLogic, Dell Boomi, IBM Cast Iron, and others are trying to work on this problem set.

But there are other areas that integration come into play — services like Tibco’s Tibbr and Salesforce’s Chatter are attempting to build a social fabric across an organization that, at least with a broader definition, constitutes a sort of integration. They bring together discrete sets of data and workflow and try and deliver sense out of them all.

Other solutions like WalkMe aim to resolve the cognitive dissonance that comes from too much exposure to too many different solutions. WalkMe has taken the approach of enabling online self-service to overcome some of what integration aims to solve — the user experience problems caused by discrete packets of software.

And then there is a further discussion to be had, that of whether lightweight integrations, a sort of “minimum viable product” approach to software integration, is sufficient in this loosely couple modern world or whether the traditional enterprise approach with big and heavy integration solutions, data warehousing and ETL is still required — does the proliferation of APIs solve this issue?

I’m looking forward to moderating an integration session at CloudBeat where I’ll be talking with panelists including SnapLogic CTO Chris Wagner and Informatica SVP Juan Carlos Soto. The overarching theme for the integration track is to explore the real need for consistent workflows, integration tools, common data formats, and other solutions to help tie a multitude of disparate systems together.

In my session, we’ll be focusing strongly on lightweight cloud integration versus enterprise-grade and asking whether companies really need all the bells and whistles that come with traditional integration solutions, like ESBs, ETL, or EAI tools. Or are today’s exponentially growing library of APIs, paired with more affordable SaaS-based integration tools, enough to get the job done well?

It’s going to be a fun and informative session — why don’t you join us?

Darragh and I also talked about the very competitive marketplace Abiquo is in. I wondered whether, over the mid term, we are going to see significant consolidation (as we have already done with the VMware acquisition of DynamicOps). Darragh believes (or at least says publicly) that while infrastructure is undoubtedly becoming commoditized, organizations simply don’t want to use the same stuff as their competitors – Darragh’s point seemed to be that there is competitive differentiation to be gained at the management layer. I’m not convinced of that – organizations want a management layer that works, beyond that the different tools are somewhat homogeneous in the eyes of the customer.

As I wrote previously, Darragh is hyper focused on building out customer numbers for Abiquo. Currently the company is adding around 5-10 customers per quarter but Darragh wants to increase this cadence – he’s been talking with global SIs and regional MSPs alongside actual enterprise customers. I’ve spoken with other management vendors about who they’re competing with at the negotiation stage of a sale – I’m not seeing much evidence that Abiquo is in the hunt on these deals – that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Abiquo seems to have been focusing more heavily on the MSP market and hence has, until now, left enterprise customers to some of the other vendors – it will be interesting to see how a renewed focus on enterprise works out – and how they go in a competitive situation alongside the more well known players.

There is no doubt that what Abiquo and other similar vendors do has value – a survey that the company just performed found that 46% of cloud services are manually provisioned by an IT administrator, with no automation. The survey had some interesting data about cloud uptake, and the automation of that cloud. Despite 75% of respondents reporting that their company offered private, public or hybrid cloud services to customers, just 15% of these provide a ‘self-service’ interface that enables end user control. The other finding of the survey related to the time to deployment of cloud – the most common SLA for provisioning a customer request is ‘within three days’, for 37% of customers. Just 15% of respondents commit to providing virtual cloud services to customers within three hours, although a further 25% are able to spin-up services within 24 hours. The actual numbers here are of secondary importance to the very fact that deploying cloud within an enterprise is slow – and that automation and end-user self-service are valid product areas – 45% of respondents are not using orchestration of any kind, 32% are using VMware management tools, but only 5% are using built-for-purpose orchestration and management software. Darragh points out this failing saying:

The vision for cloud is meant to be simple, flexible and immediate – unfortunately, in reality this appears to be the exception rather than the rule. It seems that whilst cloud has certainly progressed from a technology and an infrastructure perspective, how it’s delivered to users and customers is still a decade behind. For cloud to reach its potential, the next step for IT decision makers is to get their arms around the complexity of the stack and plug it all into one interface that connects everything in the back end, with a straightforward interface for the user. For a cloud deployment to be successful the end user should be able to deploy services in minutes. If that is not designed or built into the cloud then the value is diminished significantly. There shouldn’t be any need for manual intervention by the IT department. IT can retain control and governance without having to manually provision new services.

Finally we talked briefly about the latest version of the software released by Abiquo – Enterprise Edition 2.2 shows a renewed focus on storage via an exposed iSCSi plugin architecture  that allow customers to create their own storage volumes. Other changes rolled out in this version include;

• Controlled infrastructure – Abiquo’s delegated administration capabilities can include one or more physical datacenters. This allows for controlled delegation of the physical infrastructure. It can include one or more AbiquoEnterprises allowing for the improved delegation of user or customer administration
• Support for KVM 6 – The Abiquo platform supports the virtualization infrastructure KVM 6 allowing customers to take advantage of improved KVM features relating to IP throttling and security.
• Customisable design – The design of the Abiquo platform is customisable through its Branding Web Application which can create new branding themes for service providers or enterprises offering white label services. The application allows for a new branding theme to be created in minutes
• Improved ESX integration
• Improved reporting and billing

The ability to white label the product in particular talks to a value prop for MSP customers. This and the company’s European presence (Darragh is UK based) offer up some interesting opportunities for the company.