Appcara hones its cloud application deployment and management claim with App360

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1 Appcara hones its cloud application deployment and management claim with App360 Analyst: William Fellows 12 May, 2015 Appcara has renamed its AppStack cloud application deployment and management tools to App360 to better communicate what it believes is the holistic nature of the product. It's also switched horses, and is using OpenStack as its core delivery platform, and has made App360 available on Pluribus Networks' F64 Network computing appliance. The 451 Take Appcara is benefitting from an increasing focus on application and service management, as opposed to infrastructure management, as service providers try to raise their IQs in order to deliver business outcomes to enterprise buyers, rather than simply infrastructure. Adding services on top of infrastructure provision is where the industry's center of gravity is now. Pluribus With App360 being available on Pluribus Networks' F64 Network Computing Appliance, Appcara believes it provides a turnkey system for application SLA in the cloud. Pluribus is a well-funded and well-connected SDN venture that will bring Appcara some important visibility and deployment opportunities. It will enable users to manage and allocate bandwidth according to an application's SLA/QoS. Appcara says it has other network vendors approaching it on the back of the Pluribus deal. Technology Appcara's App360 is designed to deploy and manage prepackaged applications into private and Copyright The 451 Group 1

It's also switched horses, and is using OpenStack as its core delivery platform, and has made App360 available on Pluribus Networks' F64 Network computing appliance.

2 public clouds, and to move those applications between them. Appcara's marketplace offers some 60 packaged software applications to deploy. The user selects an app, selects a cloud and deploys. It also provides a publishing toolkit that firms are using for example, BT packages 20 applications (BT and third-party) to its customer VIRTUS Data Centres using Appcara. Available in editions for service providers, enterprises and as an appliance, it can be used by DevOps teams, by corporate end users to perform self-service application provisioning, and by cloud service providers to offer application services to their customers. App360 Version 3.12 adds a number of features and enhancements for improved multi-cloud management. New OpenStack/CloudStack capacity-limit controls include limitation settings for instances, CPI, RAM, storage and volumes, while capacity-checking and reporting capabilities allow for daily auto-caching of limits and usage data, among other items. The new version also allows CloudStack users to make CPU and memory changes in virtual machines. App360 uses a model-based approach to capture and define application states and components such as the tiers they occupy, relationships and dependencies between components, and configuration parameters and maintains these over time in a configuration repository. Its application portal captures changes in real time. Appcara's approach automates the provisioning and maintenance of applications over time versus server templates and scripts, which are more static in how they address basic app-launching purposes. It's similar to using Parallels' APS application packaging standard. Appcara can discover and copy applications that haven't been installed using App360; however, using App360 ensures an application's configuration settings can be managed after migration it can't do this for applications that have been copied/migrated, but haven't been installed via App360. A server on-boarding agent enables users to register cloud resources (for example, VMs running on AWS) on the App360 console. It facilitates the creation of a data model of an external server that can be reused for deployment elsewhere for example, deploying Exchange into a cloud and then migrating mailboxes and data. This is especially important for its service-provider audience, which is typically trying to support the need to end-of-life on-premises Exchange and other systems and move them into the cloud. It's a chargeable module in App360. There are Enterprise and Service Provider Editions of AppStack. The latter offers higher redundancy and scalability. The Enterprise version can be used with Apache CloudStack, Citrix CloudPlatform, VMware vcloud Director, Eucalyptus or IBM Pure Systems private clouds. It can also be used with Cloud Profiles for public cloud services, including AWS EC2, Rackspace Cloud, HP Cloud and IBM Smart Cloud. Copyright The 451 Group 2

Available in editions for service providers, enterprises and as an appliance, it can be used by DevOps teams, by corporate end users to perform self-service application provisioning, and by cloud

3 While Appcara had long seen CloudStack and Citrix CloudPlatform as the leading platforms for cloud orchestration, these have lost ground, and as a result Appcara has recently switched allegiance to OpenStack, which is its primary deployment platform going forward. However, Appcara still also supports VMware and CloudStack alike, since these will remain important for many into the future. Business model Appcara was founded in 2010 with a vision of holistic application and workload management, integration, and mobility. Product development was funded by consulting and private investment from the company's founders, including CEO John Yung. Appcara raised an initial $500,000, and in 2012 took in two undisclosed rounds of private funding to drive long-term growth. It began revenue shipments in Q3 2012, and claims to have been at or better than breakeven since the beginning of It raised a $5m round of funding from undisclosed sources in 2014, and a smaller tranche more recently. Its 25 staff members are based in California, Singapore and Hong Kong. Appcara did just more than $1m in revenue in 2014, slightly up on 2013, and claims to have done more revenue in Q than in the last six months. Ninety percent (90%) of Appcara's revenue is from service providers 10% from enterprises. Most of its business (40%) is in Asia, with 40% in North America and 20% in EMEA. Its average deal size is $150,000 (higher than rival Scalr, it believes), and the company claims customer wins at the likes of BT, HP Cloud services, NCS, Intermedia, AIS, SingTel, Sri Lanka Telecom and others. Appcara claims to have 13 large service providers as customers, all told. Hong Kong-based ICT supplier OneAsia has deployed Appcara's own App360 Appliance PRO turnkey system (which includes integration with Pluribus Networks' Netvisor OS) into its datacenters in China, and is planning to expand into its Southeast Asia datacenters as the next step. It will offer this to customers as a Cloud Orchestrator system. Competition Firms such as Scalr, UShareSoft, Dell Cloud Manager and RightScale have competed with Appcara in the past, although it claims to see them rarely these days. Appcara does see CliQr, which is strong in the service-provider sector. Other vendors with cloud application deployment activities include BMC, CA Technologies, CiRBA, Cisco, CSC, HP, Cloudsoft, SixSq, Rackspace, RightScale, Verizon, Automic, BitRock, Egenera, VMTurbo, Cloudmunch, CloudVelox, ElasticBox, Electric Cloud, OutSystems, Ravello Systems, Skytap, Apprenda, RiverMeadow, RISC Networks and Racemi. Copyright The 451 Group 3

Business model Appcara was founded in 2010 with a vision of holistic application and workload management, integration, and mobility.

4 SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses App360 sounds less like a prescriptive infrastructure 'stack' a la AppStack, and more like an application management tool in the cloud management services sector. Although it is picking up partners and customers, Appcara's challenge will be to grow quickly enough to become and stay relevant in the market. Opportunities Threats Pluribus is an important win for Appcara it touches many service providers and will bring improved visibility for App360. There is no shortage of newcomers championing alternative approaches to application and service management in the cloud. Appcara will need to demonstrate that it can differentiate as the noise level rises. Copyright The 451 Group 4

Opportunities Threats Pluribus is an important win for Appcara it touches many service providers and will bring improved visibility for App360.

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5

'Run any app on any cloud' is CliQr's bold claim

'Run any app on any cloud' is CliQr's bold claim Analyst: William Fellows 28 Jan, 2013 CliQr Technologies' claim is a bold one: the Sunnyvale, California-based vendor says that its CloudCenter orchestration