And the Look on the CEO’s Face… Priceless

I’ve been learn­ing a lot at the Cloud Expo this week, even sift­ing through the var­i­ous sales pitches to get at the heart of the changes hap­pen­ing. Cloud computing’s about a lot of things, for some it’s data cen­ter out­sourc­ing, for oth­ers it’s about elas­tic capac­ity. For me, it’s more about eas­ing inte­gra­tion and chang­ing the way soft­ware is pur­chased and deployed.

For AppZero (for­merly Tri­gence), it’s about deploy­ing appli­ca­tions across any cloud vendor.

If I under­stand it cor­rectly, they’ve got an abstrac­tion layer that allows you to install the appli­ca­tion with­out affect­ing the OS “space.” In doing so, it becomes pos­si­ble to move instances of your appli­ca­tions between cloud ven­dors (or between your own data cen­ter and the cloud). They have a very slick demo, in which they deployed an appli­ca­tion to Google and moved it to Ama­zon Web Ser­vices. You can even try it your­self.

Greg O’Connor (AppZero CEO) was pre­sent­ing. Greg’s one of the key peo­ple respon­si­ble for Progress buy­ing my com­pany, Actional, about 3 years ago. His vision, along with that of Hub Vandervoort’s and Gor­don Van Huizen’s, have given me a good career-home for the past three+ years. In any case, I’m clearly a “friendly,” though per­haps a mis­chie­vous one.

Greg was answer­ing a ques­tion about test­ing the app, and some­thing popped into my head. I actu­ally raised my hand, and it was like tele­path­i­cally we went back and forth:

“David, don’t mess with me.”

“No, Greg, I’ve got a real ques­tion, and it relates to what this other guy asked.”

“OK, I’m going to trust you, don’t let me down.”

He called me by name, which I think raised some eye­brows. I was the only per­son in the room with a suit too, so I stood out a bit. After my ques­tion, there was a bit of a blank look that I took for sur­prise. Then, a “yeah, we can do that.” I think I was even sit­ting next to one of his employ­ees, who leaned over and said “hey, that’s a good idea.”

You see, they were talk­ing about test­ing. And, it occurred to me that it might be inter­est­ing to deploy an appli­ca­tion and a test har­ness into an AppZero con­tainer, which can then be put on any cloud they sup­port. Once deployed you could run the test har­ness and, know­ing that the appli­ca­tion is the same, you can eas­ily test rel­a­tive ven­dor per­for­mance (and other char­ac­ter­is­tics) across mul­ti­ple clouds.

To me, that sounds hugely beneficial.

It was funny, peo­ple thought I was plant. I was talk­ing to a guy from Cor­nell after­wards, and he men­tioned that AppZero would be good sim­ply for upgrad­ing hard­ware. Appar­ently, unin­stalling an app, upgrad­ing hard­ware, and rein­stalling on a new plat­form is pretty time con­sum­ing. Like I said, I learned a lot this week talk­ing to other atten­dees. What fun.

I’m look­ing for­ward to keep­ing an eye on AppZero, and wish Greg and his team the best of luck.