MuleSoft Takes Full-Service Integration to the Cloud with iON Platform, iApps Marketplace

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on MuleSoft's new iON cloud integration offering that provides new hosted integration abilities for enterprises, SaaS providers and system integrators.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Join the iON beta program. Sponsor: MuleSoft.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Welcome to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise application integration (EAI) as a function is moving out of the enterprise and into the cloud. So called integration platform as a service (iPaaS) has popped up on the edge of the enterprise. But true cloud integration as a neutral, full service, and entirely cloud-based offering has been mostly only a vision.

Yet, if businesses need to change rapidly, as the cloud era unfolds, to gain and use new partners and new services, then new and flexible integration capabilities across and between extended applications and services are essential.

The older point-to-point methods of IT integration, even for internal business processes, are slow, brittle, costly, complex and hard to manage. Into this opportunity for a new breed of cloud integration services steps MuleSoft, a market leading, open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) provider, which aims to create a true cloud integration platform called Mule iON.

MuleSoft proposes nothing short of an iPaaS service that spans software as a service (SaaS) to legacy, SaaS to SaaS, and cloud to cloud integration. In other words, all of the above, when it comes to integrations outside of the enterprise.

We'll learn here today about MuleSoft iON, how it works and its pending general availability in the summer of 2011. We'll also delve into the potential for an iON marketplace that will provide integration patterns as shared cloud applications, with the likelihood of spawning constellations of associated business to business ecosystems.

Here to define the vision for a full-service cloud-based integration platform solution are two executives from MuleSoft. Please join me now in welcoming Ross Mason, Chief Technology Officer and Founder, MuleSoft. Welcome, Ross.

Ross Mason: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Ali Sadat, the Vice President of Mule iON at MuleSoft. Welcome, Ali.

Ali Sadat: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: Ross, tell me a little bit why have things changed so much that a fundamentally new approach to integration is required?

Mason: There are a number of drivers in the marketplace pushing us toward integration as a service and particularly iPaaS. First of all, if we look back 15 years, integration became a focal point for enterprises, because applications were siloing their data in their own databases and for business to be more effective, they have to get that data out of those silos and into a more operational context, where they could do extended business processes, etc.

What we're seeing with cloud, and in particular the new wave of SaaS applications, is that we're doing a lot of the same mistakes for the same behaviors that we did 10 years ago in the enterprise. Every new SaaS application becomes a new data silo in the cloud and it’s creating an integration challenge for anyone that has the data across multiple SaaS providers.

New computing models

And it's not just SaaS. The adoption of SaaS is one key thing, but also the adoption of cloud and hybrid computing models means that our data also no longer lives behind the firewall. Couple that with the drivers around mobile computing that are enabling our workforce and consumers, when they are on the go, again, outside of the firewall.

Add the next social media networks and you have a wealth of new information about your employees, customers, and consumers, available through things like LinkedIn and Facebook. You've also got the big data explosion. The rise of things like Hadoop for managing unstructured data has meant that we end up pushing more data outside of our firewalls to third party services that help us understand our data better.

There are four key drivers: the adoption of SaaS applications; the movements by using more cloud and hybrid models; mobile is driving a need to have data outside of the enterprise; and then social media and also big data together are redefining where we find and how we read our information.

Gardner: So, it seems to me Ross that the older ways of doing this were plausible when we had the majority of integration points inside the firewall and maybe just a handful or a couple of external points. But what’s happening is the shift, as you are describing about these trends, is making it increasingly more points outside than inside.

It strikes me that we're moving the fulcrum or the balancing point of the number of integrations that need to be supported further and further toward the edge -- and then ultimately outside the organization. So do you agree with that? Is this for your average enterprise that we’re going to start to see this avalanche of outside integration points?

Like it or not, any company of any size has some if not most of its data now outside of the firewall.

Mason: Absolutely. We describe it internally as the center of the enterprise gravity is shifting. The web is the most powerful computing resource we’ve had in the information age, and it’s starting to drag the data away from the enterprise outside into the platform itself. What this means for enterprises is, like it or not, any company of any size has some if not most of its data now outside of the firewall.

I'm not talking about the Fortune 2000. They still have 95 percent of their data behind the firewall, but they’re also changing. But, for all of the enterprises and for forward-thinking CIOs, this is a very big and important difference in the way that you run your IT infrastructure and data management and security and everything else.

It turns a lot of things on its head. The firewall is constructed to keep everything within. What’s happening is the rest of the world is innovating at a faster speed and we need to take advantage of that inside enterprises in order to compete and win in our respective businesses.

Gardner: It also appears that there will be a reinforcing effect here. The more that enterprises use cloud services, the more they’ll need to integrate. The more they integrate, the more capable and powerful the cloud services, and so on and so on. I guess we could anticipate a fairly rapid uptake in the need for these external integrations.

Mason: Absolutely. We’ve been blown away at MuleSoft at the demand for iON already. We think we might be a bit early in carving out the iPaaS market, but the response we're hearing, even from our largest organizers, is that most have lots of needs around cloud integration, even if it's just to help homogenize departmental applications. [Join the iON beta program.]

New enterprises

But, we're talking to a lot of other CIOs who are looking at the cloud as the way they're going to go in the next three years, and they look at everything as being cloud-based versus on-premise if possible. We see this a lot in the new enterprises that have grown up in the last five years as well.

Gardner: And, MuleSoft has been a leader with an open-source model. How do you see the open-source values and benefits aligning with some of these cloud effects, as we’ve been describing?

Having a platform that’s open and freely available and that they can migrate off or on to and manage themselves is extremely important.

Mason: The open-source model is absolutely critical, and the reason is that one of the biggest concerns for anyone adopting technology is who am I getting into bed with? If I buy from Amazon, ultimately, I'm getting into there with Amazon and their whole computing model, and it’s not an easy thing to get out.

With integration, it’s even more of a concern for people. We’ve looked through the vendor lock-in of the 1990s and 2000s, and people are a little bit gun-shy from the experiences they had with the product vendors like Atria and IBM and Oracle.

So, when they start thinking about IaaS or the cloud, then having a platform that’s open and freely available and that they can migrate off or on to and manage themselves is extremely important. Open source, and particularly MuleSoft and the Mule ESB, provides that platform.

Gardner: Ali, let’s move to you. If you don’t mind, let’s talk a little bit about the problem set. Certainly, the vision is there, the market drivers are there, and the opportunity executing on this then becomes the issue. So how do you see process enablement happening? How can different types of integrations now come into this neutral cloud domain, and what sort of integrations are we talking about?

Sadat: It’s a pretty interesting problem that comes up. The patterns and the integrations that you need to do now are getting, in a sense, much more complex, and it’s definitely a challenge for a lot of folks to deal with it.

We’re talking not only to cloud-to-cloud or enterprise-to-enterprise, but now extending it beyond the enterprise to the various cloud and the direction of data can flow either from the enterprise to the cloud or from the cloud to the enterprise. The problems are getting a little more challenging to solve.

The other thing that we’re seeing out there is that a lot of different application programming interfaces (APIs) are popping up -- more and more every day. There are all kinds of different technologies either being exposed to traditional web services or REST-based web services.

We’re seeing quite a few APIs. By some accounts, we're in the thousands or tens of thousands right now. In terms of APIs, they're going to be exposed out there for folks who are trying to figure out and how to integrate. [Join the iON beta program.]

Gardner: Given that there is this variety of integrations and more types of integrations across different types of organization, where do we give the capability for managing this? It’s one thing to put the integration execution functionality in the cloud, but what about the driving tools, the ability to define and create the integrations and to manage them? What do you propose for that?

Hybrid world

Sadat: It’s something a hybrid world, and I think the answer to that is a hybrid model, but it needs to be very seamless from the IT perspective. The difference between integration running on premise or in the cloud shouldn't matter as much, and the tooling should be the same. So, it should be able to support both a cloud-based management, and also be able to manage and drive us in the enterprise, and set up on-premise tools.

Gardner: I see. So, we’re looking at open but familiar, agnostic in terms of the hosting environment or perhaps multiple environments, and then the secure and compliant mission-critical characteristics that most organizations are now familiar with and have created the means to support.

Tell me how this works with iON. What’s changing? What would I, as an engineer in an enterprise IT department, see differently about this?

Sadat: One of the things you’ll see about iON is a lot of familiar components. If you have been a Mule user or Mule ESB user, you will see that at the heart of iON itself. What we're providing now is the ability to be able to deploy your solutions, your integration applications to a cloud and be able to manage it there, but we also are going to give you the capability to be able to integrate back into the enterprise.

There will be some very similar aspects of Mule that you’ll see as part of iON and also some very new components. The pieces that we're going to take away are the infrastructure. Trying to manage, download, and install all of those things naturally just goes away by the nature of that being cloud.

What we're providing now is the ability to be able to deploy your solutions, your integration applications to a cloud and be able to manage it there.

Gardner: Here's the question I get a lot from folks. If the tooling is similar and if the underlying technology being an open-source stack is similar, why can’t I just use my existing enterprise point-to-point, EAI functionality for this extended enterprise cloud activity? What’s the answer to that?

Sadat: The answer to that is a great analogy. If you look at their current applications why can’t I just take my Oracle and SAP application, stick it into Amazon Web Services (AWS), and call that a cloud.

Let me walk you through a quick example here. A lot folks have been deploying Salesforce as an application. It has definitely been very popular, probably number one out there. Now, they want to integrate this back into their SAP applications.

If I want to do a real-time integration between Salesforce and an SAP, how do I enable that? If I poke holes from my firewall that’s going to definitely expose all kinds of security breaches that my network security folks are not going to like that. So how do I enable that? This is where iON comes into play.

We’re going to sit there in a cloud, open up a secure public channel where Salesforce can post events to iON, and then via a secured connection back to the enterprise, we can deliver that directly to SAP. We can do on the reverse side too. This is something that the traditional TIBCOs and WedMethods of of the world weren’t designed to solve and they weren’t even thinking about this problem when they designed and developed that application. [Join the iON beta program.]

Across boundaries

Gardner: Okay, so businesses are going to need to find ways of integrating across these boundaries, taking advantage of more services that become available but managing the data across them. What needs to be completely different about your vision of a neutral cloud based capability or platform?

Suppose we could ask, why not just use what Salesforce provides you and let that be the integration point? Why would you separate integration cloud capability?

Sadat: Integration, as a whole, is much better served by neutral party than just going by any one of the application vendors. You can certainly write custom code to do it, and then people have been doing it, but they've seen over and over that that doesn’t necessarily work.

Having a neutral platform that speaks to APIs on both sides is very important. You’re not going to find Salesforce, for example, adopting SAP APIs, and vice versa. So, having that neutral platform is very important. Then, having that platform and being able to carry out all the kinds of different integration patterns that you need is also important.

We do understand the on-premise side of it. We understand the cloud side of the problem. We're in a unique position to bring those two together.

Having that platform and being able to carry out all the kinds of different integration patterns that you need is also important.

Gardner: Let’s go back to you, Ross. Please define for me what you consider the top requirements for this unique new neutral standalone. I guess you could call it the Switzerland, the ESB of ESBs, the integration of integration points. What do you think are important characteristics for this to have that maybe you can’t do for your SaaS provider and you can’t do on-premises?

Mason: I'll start with the must-haves on the PaaS itself. In my mind the whole point of working with a PaaS is not just to do integration, but it’s for a provider, such as MuleSoft, to take all the headache and hard work out of the architecture as well.

For me, a true PaaS would allow a customer to buy a service level agreement (SLA) for the integration applications. That means we are not thinking about CPUs, about architecture, or I/O or memory usage, and just defining the kind of characteristics they want from their application. That would be my Holy Grail of why a PaaS is so much better?

For integration, you need that, plus you need deep expertise in that integration itself. Ali just mentioned that people do a lot of their own point to points and SaaS providers do their own point integrations as well.

We spend a lot of money in the enterprise to integrate applications. You do want a specialist there, and you want someone who is independent and will adopt any API that makes sense for the enterprise in a neutral way.

We’re never going to be pushing our own customer relationship management (CRM) application. We're not going to be pushing our own enterprise resource planning (ERP). So, we’re a very good choice for being able to pull data from whichever application you're using. Neutrality is very important.

Hugely important

Finally, going back to the open-source thing again, open source is hugely important, because I want to know that if I build an integration on a Switzerland platform, I can still take that away and run it behind my firewall and still get support. Or, I just want to take it away and run it and manage it myself.

With iON, that’s the promise. You’ll be able to take these integration apps and the integration flows that you build, and run them anywhere. We're trying to be very transparent on how you can use the platform and how you can migrate on as well as off. That’s very important. [Join the iON beta program.]

Gardner: Before we get into the details of your recent news, help me understand what you just mentioned about these patterns and these applications. If they're portable, as you are describing, then it seems to me that you’re creating an ecosystem, almost an opportunity in the market, for a new type of independent software vendor (ISV) or services vendor.

Describe for me how you'd expect a community-based approach or market-place based approach to happen with these integration patterns. What will motivate people to want to get in there and do the hard work creating them in the first place?

Sadat: The marketplace approach works because of the domain expertise you need for all these various applications. It’s hard for a neutral player to have enough deep expertise in every application that’s out there and every business process to build it out. You have seen number of vendors have tried, and even the ones who owned the applications have tried and failed.

It’s hard for a neutral player to have enough deep expertise in every application that’s out there and every business process to build it out.

If you look at the Oracle AIA and the PIP approach, they tried to build it all themselves and it just doesn’t work. Having a marketplace where people with their own intellectual property and their own expertise come out and build these solutions and offer it out to customer is a much more viable approach.

Gardner: Do you see this as a way for organizations to share this on an open-source community basis, where one hand washes the other or is there a business model, where creating integrations and being in a systems integrator role is a business and encourages more participation?

Sadat: I think you’ll see both. That’s one of the great things about the cloud and the Internet today. You can probably do a Google search and find pretty much any piece of code that you want and use it. But, at the same time, there’s an opportunity here for folks to be able to build and package some of these intellectual properties that they have as a series of integrations between applications and offer that as a service that they can charge for.

We’ve seen a lot of system integrators (SIs) who are throwing out their own custom solutions and sourcing it on AWS or somewhere else. We see those folks coming to us, and since we’re going to be providing this platform, they can run it, manage it, and monitor it all from our solution. We also give them the capability to monetize that on the same platform.

Gardner: Now that we’ve got a sense of the general problem and vision for what’s needed and a sense of what your requirements are, let’s look at the timing. You’ve come out on May 23 with the announcement about iON and describing what you intend.

Furthermore, you’re going to be coming out a little later with the general availability of iON as a platform in July. And then you’re going to be delivering some of the first iON applications shortly thereafter. So help me understand, Ali, why you’re doing it in this fashion? This is, I suppose, the basic crawl, walk, run approach. Is that it?

Public beta

Sadat: That’s correct. We started with our private beta, which is coming to an end. As you mentioned, we’re releasing a public beta. Pretty much anybody can come in, sign up, and get going in a true cloud fashion. [Join the iON beta program.]

We're allowing ourselves a couple months before the general availability to take in feedback during the beta release. We’re going to be actively working with the beta community members to use the product and tell us what they think and what they'd like changed.

One of the other things we’re doing soon after the general availability is releasing a series of iON applications that we'll be building and releasing. These will be both things that we’ll offer as ways to monetize certain integrations, but also as reference applications for partners and developers to look at, be able to mimic, and then be able to build their own applications on top of it.

Gardner: Okay. What does iON consist of? What are we talking about in terms of what you’re going to be offering for those people that go into a beta or look towards a general availability? What is it they are going to get?

Sadat: At the core of it, they get Mule. That’s pretty essential, and there’s a whole lot of reasons why they do that. They get a whole series of connectors and various transports they can use. One of the things that they do get with iON is the whole concept of this virtual execution environment sitting in the cloud. They don’t have to worry about downloading and installing Mule ESB. It’s automatically provided. We'll scale it out, monitor it, and provide all that capability in the cloud for them.

Once they’re ready, they push it out to iON, and they execute it. They can then manage and monitor all the various flows that are going through the process.

They just need to focus on their application, the integration problems that they want to solve, and use our newly released Mule Studio to orchestrate these integrations in a graphical environment. Once they’re ready, they push it out to iON, and they execute it. They can then manage and monitor all the various flows that are going through the process.

Gardner: Are there multiple tiers of integration or are you going to be a full-service integration provider at the start. Is there a crawl, walk, run approach to the depth and breadth of the integrations as well?

Sadat: Well, you know one thing about the cloud is that folks want to go out and buy all kinds of different applications that represent probably best of breed for each. You go buy CRM for Salesforce and perhaps go to SAP for ERP or maybe one of the Oracle applications. But, when it comes to integration, you don’t want to go the best-of-breed approach and then try to integrate all those different integration solutions. It just doesn’t make sense.

So, it’s important for iON to support all the different tiers of integrations. There are just three data-level integrations, synchronization at the process-level, and also the UI level. We're not necessarily going to compete with every vendor that makes their bread and butter in any one of those tiers and compete on every minute functionality that perhaps is going to be used maybe once or twice. But, we are going to provide probably 80-90 percent of what you need out of the gate with iON.

Gardner: You mentioned that what you get with this is Mule. Maybe this is a good time, Ross, for you to give us a brief history of Mule and MuleSoft and why you've become a leader. What's the amount of penetration you've got globally for those folks who might not be that familiar with your open-source legacy.

Wider integration

Mason: MuleSoft started originally as an open-source project that I started back in 2003. I'd been working as an architect in various banks in the UK, and we'd seen a need for a much better and wider integration than we were doing at a time, which was more of and enterprise information integration (EII)-based integration.

The project started in 2003. We went to version 1.0 in 2005 and we got massive pick up pretty much across all verticals and our customer roster echoes back to that as well.

The interesting thing about MuleSoft, the reason why we've done so well in the space, is that we stayed very true to a couple of key principles. One was simplicity. Just being able to integrate something well and easily and simply is hugely important.

There is a statistic that says we spend probably $1 on applications and we spend $7 on integration in the enterprise. We aimed to reduce that cost by providing much cleaner, simpler, and easy to use tools to developers without too much knowledge.

We stuck with that philosophy of simplicity all the way through, and it helped carry us through lots of other phases and now with the cloud. It’s a very nice fit, because if you're integrating with many more applications, you've got to make it super simple for people to do so. MuleSoft has made great strides to do that, coupled with the fact we've always been promoting a non point-to-point integration approach.

We stuck with that philosophy of simplicity all the way through, and it helped carry us through lots of other phases and now with the cloud.

Our software does all the heavy-lifting for you. It will decouple your data and application logic from your runtime. It scales very well, and we have some of the biggest companies in the world running Mule with mission-critical applications. In fact, we have about 3,000 production deployments that we track right now, so it’s probably one of the largest ESB deployment bases that is out there on open source.

We've got very good penetration and we continue to try and innovate and push the envelope forward of what you should expect from a new integration provider. That’s why we're going down this iPaaS route, because we believe we are the best vendors to do the job. [Join the iON beta program.]

Gardner: Ali, we’ve mentioned that moving into the cloud is an opportunity with your being neutral and discussed why that’s important. It seems to me, however, that there is also a channel opportunity that not just enterprises will be looking to this. There is a whole ecosystem of different hosting providers, managed-service providers (MSPs), SaaS providers, colocation providers, all of whom have a vested interest in allowing companies to move their applications and data to be portable to explore and experiment with these different hybrid computing models.

Do you expect that iON in the cloud is going to be something that not only would be appealing to enterprises but also to these other players in the ecosystem, and how will that work?

Sadat: We see that as a huge opportunity for iON. Today, they don’t have a whole lot of choices in terms of being able to build and embed OEM services in a cloud fashion into various applications or technologies that they are building. So, iON is going to provide that platform for them.

Embeddable platform

One of the key things of the platform itself is that it is very embeddable. Everything is going to be exposed as a series of APIs. SIs and SaaS providers can easily embed that in their own application and even put their own UI on top of it, so that underneath it it says iON, but on top, it’s their own look and feel, seamlessly integrated into their own applications and solutions. This is going to be a huge part of iON.

Gardner: Well, it's one thing to describe something, but what can you tell us about folks that have been in your program, that have explored integration as a service from a cloud provider perspective or source? Are there any examples that you can provide for us? What they have done with it and what it's done for them?

Sadat: Sure, we can talk about one of the partners that it’s looking to probably be on iON as one of the first adopters from a SaaS provider and this is PeopleMatter. If you're not familiar with them, they are a very fast growing SaaS provider. They provide an HR solution for the service industry. This is for restaurants, hotels, small organizations that provide service and there is a lot of churn in terms of employees coming and leaving.

So, they simplify that model. As you can imagine, the clientele that they are working with is not going to be as sophisticated. Probably it might be a restaurant chain that owns 10 restaurants, but has a very simple IT infrastructure if any.

So, iON is going to be able to provide a quick integration. It will be something that will be embedded in their application that they can offer to their customers as a very seamless piece of their solution. Their customers are not going to be exposed to integration complexity, and it’s going to be something that you just pick and choose and integrate directly with their applications without having any issues.

It will be something that will be embedded in their application that they can offer to their customers as a very seamless piece of their solution.

Gardner: How do you charge for something like that? Who is involved? With your open-source approach you charge around support, maintenance, and professional services. When you move to a cloud environment and offer a pure neutral integration hub or PaaS integration hub in the sky, who gets charged and on what basis? Is it per transaction? How does that work?

Sadat: That will depend. The platform itself will have a pretty simple pricing model. It’s going to be composed of couple of different dimensions. As you need to scale out your application, you can run more of these units of work. You'll be able to handle the volume and throughout that you need, but we are also going to be tracking events. So this is, in Mule terminology, equivalent to a transaction. Platform users will be able to buy those in select quantities and then be able to get charged for any overage that they have.

In terms of how they expose that to their customers, it will be totally up to them. They can choose to embed that into their application cost or they can charge it as a different service. One thing we've done with iON is make it very easy to consume and grow with the application provider.

It’s not going to be a huge upfront cost and a lot of unknowns in the different models of pricing for things like connectors, and connections, and those kind of things. We've made it very simple to consume the integration and also be able to charge it back to your customers, if you need to.

Gardner: It sounds like that’s very flexible. So, it could accommodate a variety of different models. I'm sure there is going to be almost as many business models as there are integration patterns, when it comes to cloud. This is all fairly uncharted territory.

Easy to consume

Sadat: Absolutely, and this is going to be one of our differentiators out there. We're trying to make it very easy to consume and be able to come into the iON community to use our services without having to worry about the huge cost of integration that currently you are going to be charged with the various venders out there.

Gardner: Looking at the future to try and understand why IaaS will become more important, I wonder about the rapid uptake in mobile, where the enterprise itself is almost redefined. People can use different devices to access different applications, regardless of the location, using mobile networks and data networks. How does that influence this? I'll ask this to Ross first. How does the mobile trend in particular affect the need for the neutral third-party integration capability?

Mason: Mobile consumers are consuming data, basically. The mobile application model has changed, because now you get data from the server and you render on the device itself. That’s pretty different from the way we’ve been building applications up till fairly recently.

What that means is that you need to have that data available as a service somewhere for those applications to pick it up. An iPaaS is a perfect way of doing that, because it becomes the focal point where it can bring data in, combine it in different ways, publish it, scrub it, and push it out to any type of consumer. It's not just mobile, but it’s also point-of-sale devices, the browser, and other applications consuming that data.

Mobile is one piece, because it must have an API to grab the data from, but it’s not the only piece. There are lots of other embedded devices in cars, medical equipment, and everything else.

The enterprise needs to be able to share its data with integration outside of its own firewall in order to create these applications.

Gardner: That’s an interesting point. The web of devices -- the Internet of sensors,. It seems as if it’s almost a requirement that all that data has to go to the cloud first, before it goes directly back to an enterprise. So having an integration point for and by the cloud would start to make more sense. Now, we’re not going to go down this path of caching and data lifecycle quite yet, but at least the integration capabilities of linking and managing the flow of the data becomes crucial.

Mason: Absolutely. If you think about that web, it needs to talk to a centralized location ,which is no one enterprise. The enterprise needs to be able to share its data with integration outside of its own firewall in order to create these applications.

Gardner: Now you’re going to be hosting this, I believe, on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at first, but you have plans to be more ecumenical in terms of where you host. Is that correct? How is that going to work?

Mason: Yes, we are. We started with Amazon EC2 because, it’s still the most ensured cloud platform doing real elastic compute, even though they had a recent outage a couple of weeks ago. People weren't architecting correctly versus Amazon. It wasn’t really Amazon’s fault. They have availability zones to help us manage data across different data centers, and everyone was using it.

If you look at Rackspace, they don’t have that capability in their cloud offering. They have it in their managed hosting. We’re interested in Rackspace, and we’re talking with them. They seem to be a bit behind the curve still on all requirements, but we’ll be reassessing again in the next three to six months, and we’ll probably be joining the OpenStack initiative as well. [Join the iON beta program.]

Gardner: Ali, back to you, how do you get started? If I've been listening to this podcast, reading about it on a blog, and I want to know more about one iPaaS generally and more specifically about iON, what would you recommend for resources?

Sadat: Today, you could definitely go through our website, start reading about iON itself, and get yourself acquainted with MuleSoft. Using the same website, you’ll be able to click on a single button and easily get your own tenants within iON and start working and playing with it. Over the months, we’ll release more documentation, more features, and by general availability, we should have our pricing model also out there.

It's definitely an easy way to get on it. Just go to the link. If you any questions, we’ll have contact information, where you can send us some direct feedback. There’s a huge community around Mule itself, and now we’re going to build one around iON that they can also leverage. There are about a 100,000 developers who already use Mule in one way or another or have knowledge about it. So, there’s a huge community. You can start leveraging by building your own applications on top of iON.

Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on how enterprise application integration as a function is moving out of the enterprise and into the cloud.

I’d like to thank our guests. We've been here today with Ross Mason, the CTO and Founder of MuleSoft. Thanks so much, Ross.

Mason: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We’ve also been here with Ali Sadat, Vice President of iON at MuleSoft. Thank you, Ali.

Sadat: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Join the iON beta program. Sponsor: MuleSoft.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on MuleSoft's new iON cloud integration offering that provides new hosted integration abilities for enterprises, SaaS providers and system integrators. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Enterprise App Store Trends Point to Need for Better Applications Marketplace for ISVs, Service Providers, Mobile Business Ecosystems

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the development of enterprise app stores and application marketplaces for ISVs to extend and modernize the applications delivery model to better serve employees, customers, and partners.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the fast moving trends supporting the escalating demand for enterprise app stores. As enterprises and most business users have rapidly adopted smartphones and made them mission critical to their work and lives, tablets are fast on their heels as a similar major disruptor.

RIM, Apple’s iOS, and Google Android devices are rapidly changing the way the world does business ... and does software. Riding along on the mobile device wave is the complimentary App Store model pioneered by Apple. The App Store is rapidly gaining admiring adopters from many quarters, thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates, and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships.

Those seeking to make application store benefits their own -- and fast, before someone else does -- come from a diverse lot. They include vendors, service providers, and communication service providers. Interestingly, though, it’s the users that have shown the way to adoption by demonstrating a comfort, a willingness, and an affinity for a self-selection process for downloadable mobile (and increasingly enterprise) applications and services.

The users are really quite happy with paying for what they have on the spot, as long as that process is quick, seamless, and convenient. So the onus is now on a variety of business service providers and enterprises to come up with some answers for app stores of their own and to serve their employees, customers, and partner ecosystems in new ways.

This can't be done haphazardly. The new app stores also must stand up to the rigors of business-to-business (B2B) commerce requirements, not just consumer-driven games.

So to learn more about how the enterprise app store market will shape up, I'm here with a panel to delve into the market and opportunity for enterprise app stores, and to find out how they could be created quickly and efficiently to strike, as it were, while the app store iron is hot.

Please join me now in welcoming our guests. We're here with Michele Pelino, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome, Michele.

Michele Pelino: Hi, how are you?

Gardner: I'm great. We are also here with Mark Sochan, the CEO of Partnerpedia. Hi, Mark.

Mark Sochan: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: And we're here also with Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Hi there, Sam.

Sam Liu: How are you doing, Dana?

Gardner: I'm great. Michele, let's go to you first. This whole applications marketplace concept is something we hadn’t even thought of perhaps two or three years ago, and it's moving very rapidly. The trend is also happening across categories.

Usually we can sort of slice and dice these things, but we are looking at consumer, business, enterprise, and service providers seeking app stores. Maybe you could sort of paint a picture for what's going on with business applications, now that we have seen the app store model really pick up and become attractive to consumers.

Importance of mobility

Pelino: In order to provide some context around the momentum that we're seeing on the app store side of the world, it’s really important to take a step back and recognize how important mobility has become to enterprises overall, as they are interacting with their employees and their customers and their partners and providers as well.

We do surveys at Forrester of enterprises in both North America and Europe to better understand those priorities and how mobility fits into overall technology initiatives. We find that three of the top priorities that are being focused on by many enterprises are related to mobility.

That includes deploying new devices to their employees. It includes supporting more types of applications for not just the employees that are working outside of the office and the road warriors that we all think about when we are thinking about mobile workers, but also expanding applications for workers who are actually in the office.

So this broadening of mobility includes many types of workers and applications that address not just the traditional email/calendaring applications, which are widely deployed by most companies, but is also pushing those applications down into line of business worker types of applications, which are tied to particular types of employees in an organization.

They're applications that may be designed for the sales team, customer service, support, or marketing. They also might be applications that are tied to the needs of particular vertical industry’s logistics or supply chain management or enterprise asset management types of applications.

Many firms are broadening the types of applications that they're deploying to their customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as to their employees.

All of these applications are where we're seeing the momentum today. Ultimately, many firms are broadening the types of applications that they're deploying to their customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as to their employees, and this momentum is continuing.

The other thing that’s driving some of this momentum is that individuals, not just employees, are going out and buying lots of different smartphone devices and mobile devices. You touched on that in your earlier comments around tablets, slates, and different types of smartphones that are out there. So, this momentum isn’t just happening within the corporation. It’s actually happening outside of that, and it's what we would call the consumerization of IT.

This means that many individuals, consumers, are driving requirements into the corporation and into the IT organization to get new types of applications on their devices, whether those devices are personally owned or ones that the corporation has as well.

This consumerization trend is also happening to drive these requirements into the organization and to really generate more momentum around applications in general as well as smartphone devices, tablets, and other types of mobile devices.

Gardner: So we have the consumers, the users, very much aligned with this trend. They seem to have adapted to it rather easily. We've also seen an ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) involved, where they see opportunities to create direct relationships or marketplaces and get new revenue. We've even seen some companies like Zynga and some of the other gaming corporations, taking off based on this apps model.

What's the last leg on the stool? It seems to me that their will be new types of app store providers. Michele, for those organizations thinking of doing this, what do they need to consider? What's important from a B2B perspective of doing an app store?

A lot of momentum

Pelino: One of the things to think about, when you are doing an app store, is to recognize that there's a lot of momentum around app stores in general and that came from the initial foray that we had seen from the device manufacturers like Apple and RIM. All the different device manufacturers have application stores tied initially to a consumer-oriented perspective.

The momentum around those app stores has driven corporations to start thinking about what they can do to more effectively and efficiently support their requirements around applications.

The thing with corporations is that IT organizations still want to control which version of the applications are in there and what types of apps an employee might have access to in a corporate environment, as opposed to what they might be doing in their personal world. Security is always a key issue here.

All of these things are really driving the need for these application stores -- but at an enterprise level. More and more applications are not just coming from what the IT organization wants to put out there, but also line-of-business workers within the organization are driving more and more application requirements.

By implementing these application stores, I, as an individual employee with a particular role will have access to certain applications. Another employee may have access to other applications that are tied to their role in the organization. And you could broaden that concept out to interacting with partners, suppliers, and customers as well.

The IT group is getting pushed by the end users and organizations that have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications.

That’s where this momentum for application stores is coming from. It's not just coming from the IT organization, but it’s coming from line of business workers who want to have applications out there for their customers, employees, and partners.

Gardner: Mark Sochan at Partnerpedia, there's a need now for an IT department or an enterprise organization to take advantage of this trend, but to do it in a way that’s amenable to them, that suits their requirements. Is this a big opportunity for IT to do something differently but perhaps even do something better than the way they have distributed software in the past?

Sochan: Absolutely, Dana. Adding to some of the comments that Michele made about IT consumerization, there is no doubt that the IT group is getting pushed by the end users and organizations that have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications. As a result, that has raised the expectations of how those same workers would like to be able browse, search, and download applications that could help them in their business world and with their productivity.

But, there are some pretty big differences between the consumer world of buying a 99-cent Angry Birds game versus downloading business applications. So some of the things that IT groups are having to think about and sort out are security and data governance, and how data that is specific to the device can be managed and, if need be, removed.

There are also issues about how the IT group can enable worker productivity and increase the satisfaction of the user base. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Savings and efficiencies

Finally, there's a need to try and find cost savings and efficiencies. If you had everyone just buying individual applications, then you wouldn’t have the benefit of bulk license purchasing or the ability to purchase through normal corporate buying processes that result in larger scales of economy.

Gardner: Michele, back to you. I know this is still early and this is a very fast-moving and dynamic marketplace, but do we have any sense of how big this is going to be? Not necessarily numbers, but do you think that most enterprises are going to want to adopt this sort of a model?

Also, this all reminds me of a couple of years ago, when we talked in services oriented architecture (SOA) terms about registry and repository, making a list items of services and/or applications, and then users could pick and choose and start beginning to make processes from them. Is this something that you at Forrester expect to be pervasive or is this going to be on the fringe?

Pelino: This is the beginning of a pretty key momentum driver in this area. What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers, are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities. What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities.

Also, as Mark said, you still have to have some control over this. You have to deal with corporate requirements around purchasing and all of the requirements internally as well. All of those factors are coming together.

About 30 percent of enterprises are using application stores do deploy some of their applications at some level.

Our surveys say that about 30 percent of enterprises -- that’s medium, large, as well as small enterprises -- are using app stores do deploy some of their applications at some level. It’s not that they're doing everything that way today. That’s the early stage of this, because this is an evolutionary path. It started on the consumer side and now it’s going into the enterprise.

As I think about what our survey data would say going into 2011, I have a feeling that, that percentage will jump pretty dramatically. More enterprises are dealing with that pain-point of the complexity of getting these applications out there, of having to have some control over which version, monitoring them, tracking what's going on with the apps, ensuring that everybody is getting the application that they should ... or not.

Those kinds of things are very important, certainly at a corporate level, and so this is driving a lot of that momentum as well, and security can't be lost in that picture either.

Gardner: Sam Liu at Partnerpedia, how do we help enterprises step into this? Is there a path? Is there some methodology, or track record involved? If I were an IT manager, I am thinking, okay, I have to build, I have to buy, or I have to partner -- or some combination to get an app store up and running.

If I have an app store that’s serving my employees, the chances are that I'm going to need to have one that’s going to be able to stand up to the rigors of delivering apps and services and business value out to my customer end-users as well.

How does an organization like an enterprise, a vendor, or a communication service provider start the process of thinking about architecting and providing an app store?

Early stages

Liu: We've talked to a number of different enterprises and various industries, and most of them are in the early stages of researching and trying to figure out what this means to them. They know that tablets are coming, but actually today’s problems have as much to do with just devices already in-house, such as smartphones.

What we're hearing in terms of platforms is that the top three platforms they're trying to figure out are iOS, Android, and the platform coming from RIM.

In that research phase, some of the issues that they're concerned about are more traditional IT policies and compliance issues. They understand the motivation from the user standpoint and the value of that, but they're really trying to understand the landscape in terms of those more traditional issues around IT control and compliance, such as security.

The other thing is that they're also more open to outsourced or cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions, as opposed to something that may be completely managed in-house via traditional software. The issue there is that they want to make sure that it actually can connect to the very secure session in the corporate environment, and that by outsourcing they are not giving that up in terms of the security and control.

What we recommend is to start with a scoped project. Don’t try to solve all of your problems at once. Figure out what you need today and build up a roadmap for how you want to get there tomorrow. So you might want to start with the current devices, such as phones and focus on maybe internal applications or select third-party applications. Deploy a project from that and then figure out how you want to evolve that towards other devices and other platforms. [Request an app marketplace demo.].

They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control.

Gardner: Mark Sochan, this isn't just about the technology of being able to serve up an application. This is also about billing, invoicing, the money trail, and then making that auditable. In certain industries, it’s a bit more of an integration issue.

How do you walk into an enterprise or a vendor and help them sort through, not just the delivery of these apps, but also the management of the charge-backs and/or processing of credit cards or other means of billing?

Sochan: At Partnerpedia we've been working with a number of the leading tablet vendors and some of the largest enterprise customers to understand what are the business problems and what are the priorities that need to be solved.

Overwhelmingly, what we're hearing is that most customers are not satisfied with just having an open marketplace that you might see from, say, the Google Apps Marketplace. They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control. That’s the first piece of feedback we are hearing.

The second piece is that there is a need to have some sort of branding. Most enterprise companies want to have some branding, so that it’s very clear to their users that this is their marketplace, this is their store. And that store has a combination of third-party built applications, similar to what you might see if you went into an Apple App Store or into the Google Android marketplace.

Custom built

But, you also see applications that have been custom built specifically for that corporation. That is, bite-size pieces of applications and business process productivity that is specific to a person’s role in that organization. Plus, some higher-end applications are coming from some of their business partners.

Because there are a variety of different sources of these applications, there are different business models that need to be addressed. The one that may be most familiar to all of us would be the ones that are the similar kinds of applications that we might find in the Apple App Store or the productivity type things, whether it’s news and information or time management or calendaring.

Then, as we move to the custom-built applications or the in-house applications, it’s also important to be able to have a way to side-load those applications and make sure that those applications are available and discoverable by the people in the organization that they are relevant to.

There's a whole idea of personalization that goes far beyond what we've seen on the consumer side, where basically everyone is presented a very similar experience in the enterprise side.

It’s very important to personalize much further to a marketing executive, for example. That’s going to be a very different set of applications that have been pre-approved and that are relevant to that marketing executive, versus someone who is on the production floor.

There's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively.

Finally, depending on the type of application and the user, there's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively. Then, they can both purchase and manage the distribution of those license, and be able to reclaim them as employees leave the organization or devices are lost, as well as allowing, as appropriate flexibility for the end-users to actually make purchases directly based on their budget. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Michele Pelino with Forrester Research, I don’t know if this is a bit outside of your field, but it seems to me that that from an IT procurement perspective we have been talking about smartphones and tablets.

When you think about the app store model as a way to distribute and manage applications to all devices -- including PCs -- you can start to get better efficiencies over licensing. You can really meter who gets applications and how often they're used and use that to decide what apps to keep or what to throw out. You can also have a better means of updating and adding security patches in a way that’s automated and centralized, rather than going from point to point.

Do have any thoughts about the IT efficiency aspects of an app store model, if we take it beyond smartphones and tablets to the entire endpoints the users use?

Evolving over time

Pelino: That is how this could evolve over time. We've been starting on the mobile device side of the world -- smartphones and tablets, those types of devices. But, at a corporate level, there are other types of endpoints that you need to manage and deploy applications to, and you want the same kind of control. You also want to have a sense of how much you are spending.

Sam mentioned, as a service type of delivery model or a per user type of delivery model, you can use different kinds of models here to keep control of the cost and have efficiencies around cost that you might not have today, because there is lots of overlap happening.

There are benefits as well, when you're thinking about individual end users who might have devices that they use in certain situations. When they're at their desk, maybe they have their laptops or desktops there. So, ultimately, you could have the same environment to integrate what an individual end-user or an employee could get in terms of the apps that they're able to get and always have a consistent experience for that.

The other side of that is just having a recognition that at the IT level, as much as they would love to control this, there are lots of devices around the bend. So even in the mobile world the devices we see today are not the ones that are going to be here tomorrow and there is more and more, almost on a day-to-day basis, being announced and put out there for end-users, whether it be enterprises or consumers to use.

How do I keep that in line? This app-store model is certainly one way to do it. But, when you think about it at the IT organization level, it’s not just about mobility. They have to think about the endpoints across the organization and this could certainly be relevant in that case as well.

The ability to create a very rich catalog of information makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Gardner: Mark, we're hearing about the benefits for an internal app store where IT, for example, might get better software distribution benefits. I know that Partnerpedia has been working with a number of early adopters on storefronts and branding around app stores. Are you finding that there is a capability here that you can, in effect, create the same app store for internal distribution as well as external, where you would be taking apps and services out to a wider audience, be it B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C)? [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Sochan: Absolutely. If you look at the core essence of an app store, there is a repository or catalog of information that makes it very easy for a company’s customers be able to find, browse, and look for products and services, not only from the vendor, but also related products and services that are of value from that vendor's ecosystem.

It almost doesn’t matter what kind of company it is. Most companies have some extended ecosystem of value-added partners. The ability to create a very rich catalog of information that your customers can browse and search and look for related products and services makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Because you're now providing them with of a go-to-market benefit directly to the customers, and from the customer’s perspective, they see tremendous value in your company’s products and services, because they see the richness of the ecosystem around it.

At the heart of it is this catalog that can be highly personalized. You can imagine that if you're now able to personalize this for your customers, where your customers are coming into this marketplace and they are not just seeing a generic marketplace, they are actually seeing a marketplace that’s been personalized to them.

Marketplace knows

This means that the marketplace already knows which products your customers have purchased from you and therefore is making a pre-selection or presenting them with information that’s very specific and related to the footprint that, that customer already has of your products.

In some cases, in a more consumer-oriented world, you may want to actually go to a transaction and actually enable purchasing. But, our enterprise customers are telling us that, equally important, if not more important, in the first steps is to have a very sophisticated lead capture engine, so that you can capture that interest that your customer has expressed, and been browsing and expressed interest in a particular product.

Then, you can route that, as appropriate, into whatever customer relationship management (CRM) system is being used and more effectively follow up with that customer, either with your own direct sales force or with passing that lead to your partners for the appropriate follow up.

Gardner: This is interesting. App stores in the enterprise seem to be the gift that keeps giving. We have distribution benefits, but now we are looking at some marketing and business intelligence (BI) benefit, where we can segment and provide a different façade or set of applications and services to different constituencies, know who they are, create a relationship, gather metadata about their activities, and then better serve them with the next round.

Back to you, Michele. Is there a marketing and a BI benefit through the app store model that allows for an efficiency in gathering information and delivering products and services significantly better than some of the past models, where these have all been in sort of similar silos and it has been difficult to integrate and pull them together?

As you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information.

Pelino: You can imagine that now, with the capabilities that you have, you're going to be able to track and understand better what individuals are doing. Are they using certain applications? What they are doing? When they are doing it? As well as better understanding how you might be able to package and put together capabilities that might be more valuable to your customers in a manner that will be useful, in an individualized manner, not just basic bundles or combinations of services.

From the BI side of this, we've only started scraping the surface, because we are in the earlier stages. But as you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information. Not necessarily marketing all the time, but appropriate information, if it’s for employees and partners and suppliers, and for the customers, certainly marketing and promotional activities could be tied in here as well.

Gardner: It sounds very good in theory. Mark, tell us a little bit about some of the ways that this is actually being used now. I know you can’t always tell us the names of the folks you're working with, because you are an OEM supplier and they may still be in pilot in terms of their own app stores, but how are these ideas really coming into fruition? What’s really going on on the street? Some use cases for this enterprise app store concept?

Sochan: What’s happening on the street is that a number of tablet vendors are seeing that having a branded app store capability around their tablets is a critical checkbox item to creating a whole product that is valuable to the enterprise. That’s the first thing that we see happening through our direct relationships with our vendors and customers.

The second thing is that the enterprise customers and consumers of these tablets are looking and starting pilots right now, where they're setting up their own branded app store to make it easier for their internal users to be able to browse and find and demo'd applications and these pilots are starting now. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Do you have any metrics of success? Are we too soon into this? Have you got any users that have put some of this into practice and said, "We did blank and then we got blank in return. There was a percent increase in this or a decrease in that?" Do we have any metrics that demonstrate what the payoffs from doing this are?

Trove of data

Sochan: As Michele motioned, there is a really exciting rich trove of data and BI that you get, because now you can see what users are interested in. You see what they are browsing.

All of us are very familiar with the Amazon-like model, where you rate products and services. The exact same thing is now enabled in these branded app stores, where the users are in real time rating the number of stars for that application. More importantly, they are giving their comments about what they found useful and areas that they would like to see improvements, which creates this very exciting innovation cycle.

Where previously you had very complex monolithic applications that got delivered and had a couple of year cycle, now you're seeing bite-size pieces of innovation that gets immediate feedback from the end-users. The developer sees that feedback almost instantly and is able to immediately respond with either bug fixes or feature enhancements.

What’s really exciting to me is just how fast the innovation and that feedback loop happens that just spurs more innovation.

Gardner: Before we wrap up, maybe we could step out a little bit into the future and think about some of the implications for this.

It's bringing up the value of the information into making better business decisions, and that business intelligence I think should not be underestimated.

Michele, how far do you think this can go? We've talked about how it could come back and affect the PCs. I am thinking that it really could change the way businesses operate in terms of their revenue, relationships with their customers, central repository and means of managing both marketing and innovation and then distribution.

Pelino: If you think about the evolution of where this could head, you're starting with the central piece of the value proposition to many of these mobile devices and tablets, which is the application, and that’s absolutely critical.

You're going to be proving out the value of the applications in these app stores. But, benefits that can be achieved are efficiencies around cost. You've got benefits around having all this information about your customers, your partners, your suppliers, your employees, or anybody interfacing with these application stores -- depending on how you're implementing them -- that you can now use to leverage and broaden out your relationships with them at various levels.

This is absolutely critical. It's bringing up the value of the information into making better business decisions, and that business intelligence I think should not be underestimated. The other side of it is, when you think about the complexities that are facing the IT organization at a real tangible level, that’s not going to go away.

As we look to the future, the complexities around these devices, around the tablets, the slates, the smartphones, the other devices that are the more traditional devices and endpoints that companies have to manage and deal with, that complexity is going to continue.

Managing complexity

When you think about where this can head, recognizing that companies are going to be looking for more efficient ways to manage that complexity, these application stores are one way to do that, and they provide a pretty cost effective way potentially, because, as Sam mentioned earlier, some of these are dealt with as a service, per user basis, per use basis, and so there is efficiencies around this that you can’t underestimate either.

Gardner: You almost want to throw another acronym out there, which would be something like "business services as a service."

Pelino: That’s not a bad idea. But, as you think of the future, there are a lot of opportunities to really build this out and have a critical impact on the strategic initiatives of the organization. It may not be just a tactical thing that the IT organization is implementing. It’s a very strategic potential for an organization to implement these stores.

Gardner: Mark Sochan, are you talking at that executive level with some of your customers? First, maybe you ought to quickly summarize what it is that the Partnerpedia is delivering to the market and then follow on with are you selling this to IT people or to strategic thinkers who are really looking at this as a business strategy.

Sochan: The core of the Partnerpedia offering is a white label, cloud-based, branded app store, that allows very efficient discovery and delivery of applications. The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them. And also providing the capability to brand that app store so that it follows the company’s logo and it has a very consistent corporate look and feel.

The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them.

Then, giving a way for users to be able to very easily search, browse, and look for applications that are specific to their role in the organization.

Finally, the license management of that software, allowing the IT department to be able to track licenses that have been purchased and downloaded, as well as be able to reclaim those licenses as is appropriate, when an employee either no longer needs that license or has left the organization or has lost the device.

And looking more to the future, we are also working very closely with customers that are building a private branded marketplace. And I distinguish between an app store and a marketplace in that a marketplace is much broader than just applications. It can be hard goods, products, services, or offerings from partners and provides just a much richer way for customers to discover value-added offerings from a company. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Who are the folks who seem to be most interested in this? Is this something you're selling at multiple levels, or do you really have the ears yet of that business strategy?

Sochan: We're seeing it in a few different industries. Certainly high-tech is an area where this lends itself very well, because most companies are moving to a cloud services world and so they're looking for new and more innovative ways to combine and recombine multiple solution offerings to come up with more valuable offerings to their customers.

Driving opportunities

This is also driving opportunities for innovation and business models. how the customer pays for it. Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models in which there can be not only just actual new sources of revenue that can come out of this, because now it’s a channel to the market.

Gardner: Michele, are there any resources at Forrester that you could point people to, if they wanted to explore this a bit more? Are there some reports, some URLs, any place that you would suggest people go to at Forrester to learn more?

Pelino: As I was talking I was referencing a few points of data from various reports that might be relevant, and you can get to those links through the Forrester site.

There's one report that sets up the complexity that’s facing many organizations that I touched on very early on, called "Managing Mobile Complexity."

There's another report that’s coming out very soon around mobility in the cloud. We've been talking about these delivery mechanisms, cloud-based delivery mechanisms for applications and services, especially around mobile devices and applications and services.

Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models.

Gardner: Mark Sochan at Partnerpedia, are there some reports, resources, white papers, ways in which people can learn more about your approach to the market and this notion of the white label in the cloud app store as a service?

Sochan: We have some great white papers that people can access from our website at partnerpedia.com, that will give very useful insights into some of the best leading practices in this area.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the fast moving trend supporting the escalating demand for enterprise app stores.

I'd like to thanks our guests, Michele Pelino, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks, Michele.

Pelino: Thanks so much.

Gardner: And Mark Sochan, CEO at Partnerpedia. Thank you, Mark.

Sochan: My pleasure.

Gardner: And also Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Thanks, Sam.

Liu: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the development of enterprise app stores and application marketplaces for ISVs to extend and modernize the applications delivery model to better serve employees, customers, and partners. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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HP Delivers NMC 9.1 as New Demands on Network Management Require Secure, Integrated, and Automated Response

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on the increasing demands placed on IT network managers and the tools available to help them.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on raising the bar for network performance management.

The IT news headlines are full of incidents of major cloud instances brought down for days, and unfortunately often weeks, with some of the largest of these due to network issues in association with virtualization and storage sprawl. The price in the cloud era for such disruptions is very high and very public.

A big part of the solution to preventing such outages comes from comprehensive, automated, and increasingly integrated network management capabilities. The tasks before network managers have never been more daunting. There are far more devices, hybrid networks, hybrid compute resources, higher levels of virtualization, and there is a need to maintain security and compliance requirements throughout.

What’s more, the pressure to keep cost down and to seek lower cost alternatives for converged infrastructure remains a constant companion to business and IT architects, and therefore an ongoing network challenge.

Into this environment, HP has recently delivered a wide-ranging update to its Network Management Center suite Version 9.1. The emphasis is on a comprehensive lifecycle approach to network management with deep data gathering, automated root cause analytics, and intelligent and proactive response features that enable consistently high performance and network reliability.

When you're not sure, you know the answer first and foremost is that it must be the network. The network is the backbone of any IT organization today.

I'm here with an HP Network Management Center expert to dig into the new offerings and to better understand why previous fragmented approaches to network performance and stability just won’t hold up for most enterprises. Please join me now in welcoming Ashish Kuthiala, Director of Product Marketing for HP Software’s Network Management Center. Welcome, Ashish.

Ashish Kuthiala: Hi, Dana. Glad to be on this call.

Gardner: This overarching network importance seems to be growing more and more. We're hearing about issues with virtualization and issues with multiple devices. The load on the network is increasing, and the complexity is increasing. Maybe you could help me understand what it is about the new environment that is taxing the older ways of accomplishing a network management function?

Kuthiala: Let’s start with a simple example of a business outage, whether that is your shopping cart, through which you do your business transactions, going down or you come into the office on a Monday morning and your email is really slow or not syncing up to the main server.

When you have a business outage, the blame is put on the IT organization. Then, within the IT organization, you're not sure whether it’s an application issue or it’s a backend database issue. Is it the server that’s not responding or is it the network? When you're not sure, you know the answer first and foremost is that it must be the network. The network is the backbone of any IT organization today.

Very complex

It’s always the first thing to be blamed and the most complex things to diagnose and solve. When you're looking at the network today, it has become very complex and is increasingly becoming more complex. With new domains coming in, such as voice over IP (VOIP), webcasts, and video traffic, multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services, unified communications, and cloud computing and virtualization, it just becomes a nightmare to manage your network for your business.

Then, you look at the volume of network devices coming online. Now, everyone wants to be in the instant-on enterprise mode. Everyone has to be connected. Everything has to be connected. Everyone expects immediate gratification and instant results. You have to respond to this opportunity continuously, and "any time, anywhere, any way" is the new tagline for anybody who is working.

Let’s look at the job of the director of network ops in a particular IT organization. Not only does he have to configure, manage, and standardize a network, he has to provision, he has to deliver, and he has to report on it. He has to do it very proactively and he has to do it very strategically at the lowest cost possible.

IT budgets are shrinking or remaining flat, whereas the demands on IT are really going up. It’s estimated that a customer can lose about $70,000 a minute during network outage, as I'm sure you’ve seen in the recent news. It's a big business inhibitor if the network goes down. It is what provides the experience to the end user for all the IT services that they experience.

Gardner: What about the old ways? Why isn’t the previous mode of network management able to keep up?

Kuthiala: Today, if you were to look into a customer’s IT department managing a network environment, you would often see a war-room like approach to managing networks. They have multiple tools, legacy approaches, and a lot of band-aids. The inability in tying together what used to be separate domains has become unacceptable.

If your shopping cart goes down doing the Christmas shopping season, and a customer tells you about it, that is just unacceptable.

The inability to cope up with the scale and complexity, the different teams hunched over their different monitors, is what I call the "swiveling chair syndrome." If there is a network outage, you have these 8 or 10 different operators looking at different aspects of the network. They are just swiveling in their chairs, talking to each other and looking for data that should really be on one screen for them to manage. The lack of scalability of such tools just adds to the problem.

Gardner: So they are fragmented and reactive. They're not proactive. Is that right?

Kuthiala: They're very reactive. If your shopping cart goes down doing the Christmas shopping season, and a customer tells you about it, that is just unacceptable. By that time, you've lost money, you have damaged your brand, and you have a number of IT people being woken up in their homes at night to resolve this problem -- and you don’t know when this will get resolved.

Gardner: Why is it that an automated approach can work? Now, you have a suite of products. You recognize that you need different tools for different parts of the equation of the problem. I guess it’s abstracting that up to a console or a single view that is a powerful approach here. Is that what’s going on?

Built-in intelligence

Kuthiala: To manage your network today, you really need to understand how your network is constructed from the bottom up, how it ties together, how it changes over time, and how it self-organizes. You need to build that kind of intelligence into your root-cause analysis.

The design of the tools has to be built ground up, based on these decisions. That’s how you need to construct the tools. That’s how they need to be integrated. For an operator, all these need to build upon each other.

It has to be in the right context. It cannot be siloed. It is a nightmare to manage. The desired nirvana for a network team is to reduce the numerous point tools to manage various aspects of network management. It has to be proactive, not reactive.

You have compliance management diagnostics and change issues that you need to take human error out of, and you need to automate that. You want to reduce the manual effort, the errors and increase control over your environment. You want to reduce the mean time to repair network outages, and maintain cost optimization as your network grows.

Today for customers, “performance is the new fault." So just because a network device is up and running, and you can ping it, doesn't mean it is providing the quality of service it should to the end user. It’s really the performance that the network is being measured against.

It’s all about efficiency, how you reduce your errors, and increase your speed through automation.

Gardner: So, it’s not so much a red light/green light effect. It’s really what is the level of performance, what are the tradeoffs, how can I remain secured and reliable, and then how can I manage my cost? That’s a fairly a big equation.

Kuthiala: Correct. It’s a pretty big equation. It’s all about efficiency, how you reduce your errors, and increase your speed through automation.

Gardner: So, HP has looked at this problem. You've been in the management business for quite some time with a long legacy with Open View, but you've been building, buying, and partnering for a wider and more comprehensive approach.

Tell me a little bit about the philosophy. I guess there are three aspects to management and a way in which you can broaden your capabilities, but at the same time give a singular view of what’s going on.

Kuthiala: So, just to recap, customers are looking for a solution that's efficient, automated, and secure for them. When they manage a network, they should be able to do things like fault, performance, change, configuration, compliance, trending and reporting, and this ties into their business services.

Long history

So, HP looked at this problem. As you know, we've had a long history of about 20 years with the HP OpenView product in network management. As we acquired other companies such as Opsware, they bought in additional tools with them. We looked at the tools and the evolving landscape of the network management domain and about five years ago, embarked on a re-architecture plan for these products from the ground up.

The approach wasn’t to make these products just work together by putting in connectors, but we wanted them to be integrated from bottom up, from the data level itself, where the data would build upon each other.

Now, as we look at the Network Management Center (NMC), it is a complete portfolio of solutions and tools that lets you do network management in an integrated and automated way.

This really builds upon the HP Network Node Manager i (NNMi), the related special plug-ins that handle complex services such as multicast traffic, VOIP, etc., as well as the network automation piece of it which really helps customers automate and manage their change, compliance, and configuration of network devices that they need to do on an ongoing basis.

The five-year journey of re-architecting our NMC portfolio completes with the 9.1 release that we are talking about today.

Gardner: Ashish, as I recall, you had a pretty large update with this whole Network Node Manager family and a whole set of smart plug-ins. This was about a year ago, Level 9.0. Maybe we should revisit that, before we think about understanding more about 9.1.

Kuthiala: The five-year journey of re-architecting our NMC portfolio completes with the 9.1 release that we are talking about today.

So, 9.0 introduced a number of features including better user interfaces, the ability to scale to large environments, and tying our products together into better functioning solutions. With 9.1, we are building on that.

We've strengthened the ability of our customers to manage cloud services. The most critical capability that a customer must have is to manage the network the same way that they have managed traditional networks, and it doesn’t matter if they have to go across the cloud or are looking at private or public clouds.

Gaining visibility

Gaining visibility into the network elements, whether they are local, off-premise or the health and quality of the cloud services that's being delivered, is the most important step. Can I reach my device? Is it healthy? Is it performing to the expected levels of business needs?

And, of course, configuration compliance management of these devices across the cloud is very important, and corrective actions and rollbacks are very important. Our tools are able to do that across different environments.

The 9.1 release is also focused on the managed service provider’s (MSP's) market needs. There is a big trend of IT outsourcing to MSPs, and one of the things that customers want to outsource is network management services. So this is a big, growing market, and our MSPs need platforms to manage their customers' network environments in a way that that maximizes their profit.

They need to scale and grow with their customer in expanding network environments, reduce their hardware spend and their training costs, as well as grow their revenues and create new lines of business, as their own customers move to new and complex services.

For example, a customer might go from traditional phones to IP telephones, and at that point, the MSP has to manage that aspect of their customer’s environment as well, and they don’t want at this point to buy a new tool.

This helps them manage multiple customers, departments or sites per single software instance, driving down their cost and giving them a flexible architecture.

The size of the customer's network might increase, and you don’t want to buy another server, another set of tools and deploy another set of operators to manage that.

We have introduced multi-tenancy capability and security groups that allow our customers to separate their data and views into secure partitions. This helps them manage multiple customers, departments or sites per single software instance, driving down their cost and giving them a flexible architecture.

We’ve also done a lot of work on the performance-based, time-based thresholds for better alerting. What this means is that the performance data is in the context of the network topology providing a unique point of your fault monitoring. It helps them with proactive notification of performance degradation, fix it proactively and guarantee service delivery levels.

We've also increased the number of months that the data is retained. It's up to 13 months now which allows you to do forecasting and trending capabilities. This is a sufficient data retention period for compliance requirements for real-time and historical data, and allows a very efficient analysis.

Our user interface (UI) has been enhanced based on the feedback we’ve gotten from customers. The common look and feel UI across all the products and our solution set ensures lower training cost -- train once, leverage across all these tools.

Contextual information

The UIs show relevant contextual information on the nodes and incidents they're managing, giving them a lot of operational efficiency. The breadcrumb history and the easy navigation with right-click menus also allows the operators to get to the root cause more quickly, making them much more efficient and improving the time to resolution.

The analysis pane shows you a number of system component help enables you to get key information including availability and performance graph really quickly.

Gardner: In some of these high-profile outages that we've had recently, it seems that they were doing updates and that caused the cascading or spiraling effect and ultimately brought the network down. For these MSPs their credibility is on the line, a lot of the money could be lost, and their service level agreements (SLAs) can't be met, and so forth.

What is it about your suite and your comprehensive approach that could help ameliorate something like that? Are you doing updates, constantly and in a dynamic, constantly changing environment? Tell me how this could be prevented in the future?

Kuthiala: A network constantly needs updates, whether its configuration updates or being in compliance with a number of different policies -- Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and government regulations.

When something goes wrong, you don't know what has gone wrong, and you are scrambling to fix it. Think about doing this across 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 devices in your network.

Typically, customers have a set of people who use multiple tools or manually log into a number of these devices and do these configuration changes manually. This is very dangerous. One, there is human error involved. Second, when something goes wrong, you don't know what has gone wrong, and you are scrambling to fix it. Think about doing this across 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 devices in your network.

Our network automation capabilities allow customers to automatically make these changes through our tools. As they implement these changes, it's takes minutes and hours, versus days, to keep these devices configured to the latest and greatest configurations and in compliance.

Think about when you are on the 59,000th device that you are updating and you realize there is an error. This was not the right thing to do, and you need to roll back. If you're doing this manually, you're spending many hours fixing the error while your business is suffering during that time. Our automation capabilities help customers; with a few clicks of buttons they are able to automate all of this.

Today, customers might be looking at a number of incidents -- 10,000, to 15,000 incidents. For example, if somebody yanks a LAN cord out and puts it back in, what really has happened is the interface has gone down and come back up. And now that is flagged as an incident or an event that the operator has to pay attention to.

With our root cause analysis engine, and the ability to map the topology dynamically in a spiral discovery fashion, the network topology is always up-to-date. The root cause analysis engine helps figure out whether this is an incident that needs to be paid attention to or not, auto-resolving some of that.

Meaningful incidents

The incidents that boil up to the operators are meaningful, and therefore are reduced in number to those that are actionable. We have had customers whose incidents have been reduced from 10,000-12,000 down to 400, and only about 100 of those have to be acted upon and escalated to the next level of management.

Automation really takes a lot of the work out of your hands and enables you to fix errors very proactively, and if there is a mistake, fix it right away with a few clicks.

Gardner: Configuration management is something we’ve heard about over the years and often it has been applied to the servers and the application workloads. Are we talking about the same type of configuration management or do you need to do it in an entirely different way on the network?

And then second, your configuration and your management center capabilities are part of the larger business service management suite or set of products and services at HP, is there a commonality between configuration management of the network and configuration management at some of the other major aspects of a converged infrastructure?

Kuthiala: I'm talking very specifically about the configuration of network devices. The software that your network device comes with is the key differentiator in how they act, and the intelligence that they provide. So this has to be not only managed really well, but there are patches and upgrades, just as you have software patches and upgrades on your servers. These have to be managed. Sometimes, there are government regulations or company regulations that you want to propagate across these devices.

It's essential to understand what type of traffic is flowing on your network. This gives you the ability to optimize your network performance and network resiliency.

But tying to the business service management set of tools or the suite stems from the fact that, when you look at it from a business service availability aspect, it’s not just about the network. There are servers, there are applications, and they are all tied together. For example, if application business service is not working, do you know if it’s the server? Do you know if it’s the application? Do you know if it is the network?

Our Business Service Management offering ties in these aspects through our runtime service model. This ties your network, to your application, to your server and is able to give your business a look into how your business service is going to be affected by the failure of any one of these infrastructure elements.

Gardner: Okay. I have seen you referred to as "application-aware network management." Maybe you could help me better understand. What do you mean by that?

Kuthiala: If you go back to the basic premise, the network is there to transit the traffic for applications themselves. It's essential to understand what type of traffic is flowing on your network. This gives you the ability to optimize your network performance and network resiliency.

The true measure of how an application is running is what a user cares about. He doesn’t really care about how the network is running. Your network has to be very application-aware so that you can tune it to the desired performance and resiliency that you need.

Gardner: Now, we've been talking about network performance management in the context of sort of firefighting and preventing outages, but as I mentioned earlier, cost is such a still an important element here.

TCO benefits

In using your approach to network management, is there some efficiency or total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits, when you have better insight into the network? When you can have these root cause analysis data points available, when you have that comprehensive view, can you then perhaps start tweaking and refining the way in which your network operates in such a way that sure you're going to keep availability and performance? Can you also find ways of developing efficiencies and therefore cut total cost?

Kuthiala: A customer that I met last year was on a prior version of our toolset and also had a number of other vendors' tools to manage his network.

We talked about the new NNMi platform, and customer’s response was, "You know, I have seven or eight people dedicated to managing my network. I have a toolset that works and I'm happy. And, I have a number of other IT projects that I need to attend to. I do understand the value of going to the new platform, but I will do that next year."

As we talked, I was able to articulate the value of how they could reduce the number of operators invested in managing the network, the number of resources, the number of different contracts they had, the server footprint, the cooling costs, etc. The customer agreed that it made a lot of sense to upgrade.

The customer came back to me in about three weeks and said, "The upgrade was easy, we got it up and running. I now have only two people managing my network. I've been able to free six people to put them on other critical IT projects. There has been a lot of savings for me and the ability to redeploy my resources has been tremendous." So, I think a lot of customers of ours are actually realizing tremendous value from taking this new approach.

The scalability of our products is immense. We're able to manage 25,000 devices or up to two million interfaces from a single server instance.

The other case that I would like to share with you is about HP Enterprise Services. They were looking to deploy 10,000 new remote workers, where people would be able to work from their remote offices or homes. And, per worker that they would deploy, they would have to invest a couple of man hours on their end with somebody on the phone sitting and getting people to configure their new equipment to work with the corporate environment in a seamless fashion.

By using automation tools, they were able to save about two hours per deployment per worker, as they rolled this program out and they deployed about 10,000 workers in a matter of few weeks versus months. They have had multiple successes with automation across their entire system and deployed it across 350-plus clients to reduce their costs, increase their efficiencies and reduce errors.

Gardner: And these economic issues are very important to everyone, but I suppose they are even especially important to those MSPs, where their margins are lower and their costs, when they cut them, can go directly to the bottom line.

Kuthiala: Absolutely. It enables them to maximize their profits. For example, the new multi-tenancy capabilities enable them to manage multiple customers from a single software instance.

It helps them drive down their ongoing hardware, software, and headcount costs that they can redeploy somewhere else. The scalability of our products is immense. We're able to manage 25,000 devices or up to two million interfaces from a single server instance.

They can partition their customers in their own secure environments and use security groups. So, they can meet their customer SLAs but drive down their costs by going to a single instance of the software.

Gardner: Now Network Management Center is a fairly significant set of different products, but most people already have something in place. So this is not a matter of starting greenfield. This is a matter of coexistence, migration, and transformation. How do you get started? What’s the typical scenario for working with a Network Management Center set by bringing it into an environment where you’ve already got installed management?

Automated capabilities

Kuthiala: Most customers today have in place something to monitor their networks, but a lot of customers have not automated their configuration, compliance, and diagnostic capabilities that we talked about.

So, let me start with that. We've seen a trend in our customer base where they buy smaller node packs to manage a small number of devices with our automation capabilities. Once they have put that in place, they start to see other efficiency use cases that they can achieve using our network automation capabilities.

We observe that these customers come back and buy more licenses for managing a greater number of network devices. So, that’s almost like a greenfield opportunity here.

But, when we look at the most customers looking at managing their networks and doing performance and monitoring, for example, if they have an instance of our software, it’s an in-place upgrade. We offer a dual entitlement and run a parallel program
that allows customers is to seamlessly set up another parallel environment and bring the network up there, start to manage it, and seamlessly shift.

We’ve had an instance of a customer in the EMEA region, where they were testing our latest software and running it in parallel to see how it was functionally different and what effect of productivity it would have on their operators. A couple of weeks went by and their senior management started getting escalations for network problems.

Once they have put that in place, they start to see other efficiency use cases that they can achieve using our network automation capabilities.

Now, when senior management turned to the network operations team and asked, "We have all these incidents showing up. What is going on? Is something wrong?"

Almost sheepishly, the network operator team had to acknowledge that they were testing the new platform and had completely forgotten about the old tool which they needed to shut down because the new platform ignored the incidents that were not meaningful. They had “accidentally” migrated to the new platform to managing the network much more efficiently.

A lot of our customers use this approach to migrate to the new platform, and of course, our approach is modular. Start with the core product and add the special plug-ins to manage your IP telephony MPLS or multicast capabilities.

Gardner: Okay, for those folks, thinking about evaluating these entry points and looking at the wider benefits of an automated managed approach to configuration on the networks, do you have any landing pages, vanity pages, whitepapers? Where can people go for more detail and more information?

Kuthiala: We have an hp.com page, which is www.hp.com/go/nmc for downloading trial software, reading whitepapers, customer case studies, product capabilities and features. That’s a good starting point.

We also blog about customer experiences and the stories they share with us as well.

To see the HP Automated Network Management (ANM) Solution in action, you can watch a short overview and the ANM 9.10 Video Demo. This recording will explain the NMC components that make up the ANM solution and walk you through a use case to demonstrate the automated capabilities of HP Automated Network Management 9.10.

Gardner: You’ve been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on raising the bar for network performance management and learning more details about HP’s new Network Management Center 9.1 release. I’d like to thank our guest. We’ve been here with Ashish Kuthiala. He is the Director of Product Marketing for HP Software’s Network Management Center. Thank you, Ashish.

Kuthiala: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast on the increasing demands placed on IT network managers and the tools available to help them. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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