Cloudsoft seeks investment to AMP up cloud application management

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Ophelia Holt
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1 Cloudsoft seeks investment to AMP up cloud application management Analyst: William Fellows 5 Apr, 2013 Cloudsoft sells the AMP application management platform, targeted at enabling organizations to develop, deploy, and manage applications and entire PaaS environments across multiple clouds. AMP is the fully supported enterprise version of Cloudsoft's open source project Brooklyn, which has been used to effectively prove the model. The next task is to sell the productized version, and Cloudsoft is seeking a round of investment to give it the boost it needs. The 451 Take Cloudsoft has spent much of its existence effectively proving its model. With customers now paying, this looks like an important corner turned. Now it's seeking funding for the product road ahead. Where this journey leads it is over the event horizon right now, but what Cloudsoft becomes when it grows up will as for most companies at this stage be largely determined by where customers take it. Technology AMP automates application configuration and deployment, optimizes application runtime management, and provides application portability. It its targeted at simplifying the deployment of applications via reusable blueprints from which implementation details are abstracted. Once deployed, these blueprints are driven by an organization's technical and business policies. Off-the-shelf AMP blueprints can be selected from a catalog or via a RESTful API. Developers can also create custom AMP blueprints that model their custom applications capturing their topology Copyright The 451 Group 1

AMP is the fully supported enterprise version of Cloudsoft's open source project Brooklyn, which has been used to effectively prove the model.

2 and attaching policies to specific elements or tiers within this which can then be added to the catalog. At runtime, AMP automates the deployment and active ongoing management of applications targeting multiple execution venues and clouds in accordance with policies. It allows end users to take distributed applications, designed and developed in conjunction with other middleware components, and deploy them via Cloudsoft's support for jclouds as well as Cloud Foundry, OpenShift and other APIs into multiple clouds. AMP's control plane implements a sensor/effector model where entities publish their key attributes as sensor events and expose operations as effector calls. Entities can be abstract AMP constructs that provide autonomic management of clusters and fabrics composed of other entities or concrete managed elements that are proxies for real-world middleware components such as JBoss7Server or MySQL. Concrete entities support pluggable drivers that can leverage existing scripts and Chef/Puppet recipes. AMP integrates with existing metrics and APIs to ensure agentless management of these entities. AMP supports composition where blueprints typically implement a hierarchical management regime similar in many ways to an organizational chart for a company. AMP Enterprise provides AMP as the foundation for a devops PaaS, and is designed for complex application infrastructure management across hybrid cloud environments. AMP Solo provides AMP as software for the specific purpose of cloud-enabled application management where a Java library is embedded with the application. Customers, partners Two key references are Betfair and Cloudera. Betfair has used Cloudsoft to create a PaaS, which is used by internal groups, but more importantly by partners deploying apps into the Betfair ecosystem. Specifically, AMP provides the deployment, orchestration and management capabilities required by Betfair's App Cloud service. Cloudera's Cloudera Certified Technology program is a self-certification program allowing partners to confirm that their products can run on Apache Hadoop, exploiting Cloudera's advanced services. Cloudera has developed a Certification Cluster Builder using Brooklyn, enabling users to deploy a standard Cloudera Hadoop Cluster onto a cloud. Like a number of cloud management and on-boarder companies, Cloudsoft has secured a place within the ecosystem of partners IBM is forming to lever its SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) platform into the market. It envisages a joint go-to-market strategy, which Cloudsoft hopes will turn into an Copyright The 451 Group 2

It allows end users to take distributed applications, designed and developed in conjunction with other middleware components, and deploy them via Cloudsoft's support for jclouds as well as Cloud

3 OEM arrangement in which it becomes a key enabler of IBM's SCE offering. Cloudsoft already provides multi-cloud enablement for Alcatel-Lucent's CloudBand Management System (which uses Hewlett-Packard CloudSystem), and has been integrated with HP CloudServices, OpenStack and other cloud platforms. Business model Having, in its view, proved its model and hit a $2m revenue marker, and with enterprises now paying for support, Cloudsoft now needs to get more organizations to part with cash, and will be focusing on product to do so. This is why it's looking to raise $2-3m in VC by summer, to strengthen its product management and build out its go-to-market and sales and marketing operations. It's had angel money so far, and of 16 staff, 13 are developers. Its baseline price for AMP premium support is $0.50 per VM per hour. Competition A number of independents are targeting the cloud application development, deployment and management space. Notable competition comes from GigaSpaces with Cloudify, AppZero, CliQr, BitRock, Virtustream, Appcara and CloudVelocity. Other firms, such as CohesiveFT, Enstratius, RightScale and ServiceMesh, are focused on core cloud platform management. ActiveState, Red Hat CloudForms, Cloud Foundry, CumuLogic and other PaaS enablers could be complementary. As Cloudsoft sees it, Enstratius and others can model multi-tier applications, but have no notion of hierarchical management, and only rudimentary knowledge of tiering and dependency injection all areas where AMP is strong. Cloudsoft says it is actively working and integrating with other cloud management and on-boarding tools, such as Enstratius and CohesiveFT. There's some overlap with other vendors in terms of the use of high-level templates and naming conventions (variously called maps, patterns or blueprints). SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses It will be tagged as a cloud service broker (among other attributions) whether it likes it or not. AMP can be used to make decisions about where to run workloads and applications based upon policy as a Best Execution Venue control plane. Opportunities Threats The 'public plus' model is falling into use and bringing all kinds of PaaS-informed cloud application development and deployment techniques into view. Witness IBM's and HP's anointing of multiple approaches. Can Cloudsoft parlay its five-year experience here into a meaningful position? Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 It's almost acting the role of a mini-systems integrator and is said to have attracted the attention of large integrators seeking to use it as the glue to plug themselves into the cloud application infrastructure space. No one company or approach has any leadership position yet, but Cloudsoft will need to find money to raise its game in order to be a voice and a player here. Copyright The 451 Group 4

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

PaaSification - use Cloudsoft's Brooklyn to create your own Force.com?

PaaSification - use Cloudsoft's Brooklyn to create your own Force.com? Analyst: William Fellows 3 Apr, 2012 Cloudsoft's mission is to enable enterprises to develop, deploy and manage business-critical