Deep-Dive Discussion on HP's New Converged Infrastructure, EcoPOD and AppSystem Releases at Discover

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction HP Discover 2011 on how HP's converged infrastructure strategy supports data center transformation and applications modernization.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. 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 in conjunction with the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas.

We’ll explore some major news around converged infrastructure and data center transformation, and learn how these strategic business goals of enterprises are more tightly aligned than ever to how IT infrastructure modernization takes root.

Until fairly recently, large IT organizations were grappling with a lot of unknown unknowns when it comes to the rapidly shifting requirements for their infrastructure and facilities. There was a sizable risk of locking in too quickly or in adopting unproven technology -- and then paying a dear price later, either in wasted investments or ending up with insufficient resources.

But now, after a series of rapidly maturing trends around application types, cloud computing, mobility, and changing workforces, the proper IT requirements mix seems much clearer. In just the past few years, the definition of what a modern IT infrastructure needs and what it needs to do has finally come into focus. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We know, for example, that we’ll see most data centers converge their servers, storage, and network platforms intelligently. We know that we’ll see higher levels of virtualization across these platforms and more applications, and that, in turn, will support the adoption of hybrid and cloud models.

In just the past few years, the definition of what a modern IT infrastructure needs and what it needs to do has finally come into focus.

We’ll surely see more compute resources devoted to big data and business intelligence (BI) values that span ever more applications and data types. And of course, we’ll need to support far more mobile devices and distributed, IT-savvy workers.

There is no longer a lot of risk in describing the quintessential data center of today and tomorrow and in recognizing that it will need to be highly energy efficient, automated, flexible, and modular. It will need to scale up and down and to adapt without complexity, delay, or undue waste.

How well companies modernize and transform these strategic and foundational IT resources will then hugely impact their success and managing their own agile growth and in controlling ongoing costs and margins. Indeed the mingling of IT success and business success is clearly inevitable.

So, now comes the actual journey. At HP Discover, the news is largely about making the inevitable future happen more safely by being able to transform the IT that supports businesses in all of their computing needs for the coming decade. IT executives must execute rapidly now to manage how the future impacts them and to make rapid change an opportunity, not an adversary.

How to execute

We're here with a panel of HP executives to explore the how -- no longer dwelling on the why or when -- to best execute on converged infrastructure and data center transformation. Please join me now in welcoming our panel, Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions for HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Helen.

Helen Tang: Thanks, Dana. Great to be here.

Gardner: We are also here with Jon Mormile, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for Performance-Optimized Data Centers in HP's Enterprise Storage Servers and Networking (ESSN) group within HP Enterprise Business. Welcome, Jon.

Jon Mormile: Thanks, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: And, we're here with Jason Newton, Manager of Announcements and Events for HP ESSN. Welcome, Jason.

Jason Newton: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, Brad Parks, Converged Infrastructure Strategist for HP Storage in the HP ESSN organization. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Parks: Thanks. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Helen, let me start with you. You've been looking at these trends, and we’ve summed up a little bit of the urgency, but also the clarity when it comes to what’s needed. You’ve done additional research leading up to the Discover conference here in Las Vegas. What are some of the findings, and how are the trends from your perspective coming together to make this IT transformation inevitable?

Tang: Last year, HP rolled out this concept of the Instant-On Enterprise, and it’s really about the fact that we all live in a very much instant-on world today. Everybody demands instant gratification, and to deliver that and meet other constituent’s needs, an enterprise really needs to become more agile and innovative, so they can scale up and down dynamically to meet these demands.

In order to get answers straight from our customers on how they feel about the state of agility in their enterprise, we contracted with an outside agency and conducted a survey earlier this year with over 3,000 enterprise executives. These were CEOs, CIOs, CFOs across North America, Europe, and Asia, and the findings were pretty interesting.

Essentially, there were three buckets of questions asked in the survey titled "The State of Enterprise Agility." The first set of question was, "How important do you believe agility is in the enterprise?" Not surprisingly, over 95 percent of respondents said, it's very critical. It’s important to their overall enterprise success, not just in IT.

The second bucket question was, "If that’s the case, how agile do you feel your current organization is?" Less than 40 percent of our respondents said, "I think we are doing okay. I think we have enough agility in the organization to be able to meet these demands."

Not surprising

So the number is so low, but not very surprising to those of us who have worked in IT for a while. As you know, compared to other enterprise disciplines, IT is a little bit more pre-Industrial Revolution. It’s not a streamlined. It’s not a standardized. There's a long way to go. That clearly spells out a big opportunity for companies to work on that area and optimize for agility.

The last area or bucket of questions we asked was, "What do you think is going to change that? How do you think enterprises can increase their agility?" The top two responses coming back were about more innovative, newer applications.

But, the number one response coming from CEOs was that it’s transforming their technology environment. That’s precisely what HP believes. We think transforming that environment and by extension, converged infrastructure, is the fastest path towards not only enterprise agility, but also enterprise success.

Gardner: Let’s look at some of the news. There are various parts, and they are related. If we take them into certain order, I think we can then look at why this whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Let’s start with Brad Parks. Looking at the Storage Foundation, HP Storage, tell me how we got here. Why has storage been, in fact, fractured, difficult to manage, and quite expensive. And then, what have we done now here at Discover to help bring that together and make that part of a larger converged infrastructure?

Parks: A couple of years ago, HP took a step back from the current trajectory that we were on as a storage business and the trajectory that the storage industry as a whole was on. We took a look at some of the big trends and problems that we were starting to hear from customers around virtualization or on the move to cloud computing, this concept of really big everything.

We’re talking about data, numbers of objects, size, performance requirements, just everything at massive, massive scale. When we took a look at those trends, we saw that we were really approaching a systemic failure of the storage that was out there in the data center.

The challenge is that most of the storage deployed out in the data center today was architected about 20 years ago for a whole different set of data-center needs, and when you couple that with these emerging trends, the current options at that time were just too expensive.

They were too complicated at massive scale and they were too isolated, because 20 years ago, when those solutions were designed, storage was its own element of the infrastructure. Servers were managed separately. Networking was managed separately, and while that was optimized for the problems of the day, it in turn created problems that today’s data centers are really dealing with.

Thinking about that trajectory, we decided to take a different path. Over the last two years, we’ve spent literally billions of dollars through internal innovation, as well as some external acquisitions, to put together a portfolio that was much better suited to address today’s trends.

Common standard

At the event here, we're talking about HP Converged Storage, and this addresses some of the gaps that we’ve seen in the legacy monolithic and even the legacy unified storage that’s out there. Converged Storage is built on a few main principles we're trying to drive towards common industry-standard hardware, building on ProLiant BladeSystem based DNA.

We want to drive a lot more agility into storage in the future by using modern Scale-Out software layers. And last, we need to make sure that storage is incorporated into the larger converged infrastructure and managed as part of a converged stack that spans servers and storage and network.

Gardner: Looking at some of the specifics, it seems as if cost is a big issue here. You've done a lot to bring cost down, going standard, and making utilization of storage more integrated into the other facets of the infrastructure. What sort of cost savings are we looking at, when you really do this well and when you look at it strategically?

Parks: There are really different aspects to cost, thinking about first capital expense. When we're able to design on industry-standard platforms like BladeSystem and ProLiant, we can take advantage of the massive supply chain that HP has and roll out solution that are much lower upfront cost point from a hardware perspective.

Second, using that software layer I mentioned, some of the technologies that we bring to bear are like thin provisioning, for example. This is a technology that helps customers cut their initial capacity requirements around 50 percent by just eliminating their over-provisioning that is associated with some of the legacy storage architectures.

One of the things we've seen and talk about with customers worldwide is that data just doesn't go away. It is around forever.

Then, operating expense is the other place where this really is expensive. That's where it helps to consolidating the management across servers and storage and networking, building in as much automation into the solutions as possible, and even making them self-managing.

For example, our 3PAR Storage solution, which is part of this converged stack, has autonomic management capabilities which, when we talk to our customers, has reduced some of their management overhead by about 90 percent. It's self-managing and can load balance, and because of its wide straightening architecture, it can respond to some of the unpredictable workloads in the data center, without requiring the administrative overhead.

Gardner: I suppose there's a bit of a catalytic effect, when you do the storage properly or with more of a modern architecture. You start to be able to move to a greater efficiencies in terms of the data lifecycle, managing data with an intelligent path in terms of where it's used and not used. Is there a larger role here for data that also plays into BI, at least addressing data as a lifecycle, rather than a problem asset?

Parks: One of the things we've seen and talk about with customers worldwide is that data just doesn't go away. It is around forever and that has contributed to this massive amount of data growth. So, one of the things we're looking at within HP Converged Storage portfolio is how do we not only help customers store that information -- for example, the ability to you have to look across up to 16 petabytes through a single pane of glass, that management view across that massive amount of information -- but how do they extract more value out of it.

Jason might talk a little bit more about the Vertica AppSystem solution, but within the storage domain, we're looking at building in intelligent search capabilities into these solutions and automated tiering to move data around either by physical location or physical tier to get more efficient and to extract more value out of that content.

Gardner: Let's now move to Jason Newton. Jason, tell about the big converged system’s portfolio news and perhaps a bit more about that AppSystem that was referenced by Brad.

Converged Infrastructure

Newton: We're really excited about this announcement. If you've heard anything from HP over the last few years, you've certainly heard a lot about the Converged Infrastructure and our strategy. In 2009, we started looking at the sprawl that customers were dealing with and the impact it was having on their business and environment. We saw that if you look ahead 5 or 10 years, convergence is a dominant trend.

That's the direction that things were going. We felt like we were in a great position as HP to be the ones to deliver on a promise of converging server, storage, network, management, security application all into individual solutions.

So, 2009 was about articulating the definition of what that should look like and what that data center in the future should be. Last year, we spent a lot of time in new innovations in blades and mission-critical computing and strategic acquisitions around storage, network, and other places.

The result last year was what we believe is one of the most complete portfolios from a single vendor in marketplace to deliver converged infrastructure. Now, what we’re doing in 2011 is building on that to bring all that together and simplify that into integrated solutions and extending that strategy all the way out to the application.

If we look at what kind of applications customers are deploying today and the ways that they’re deploying them, we see three dominant new models that are coming to bear. One is applications in a virtualized environment and on virtual machines and that have got very specific requirements and demands for performance and concerns about security, etc.

Security concerns also require new demands on capacity and resource planning, on automation, and orchestration of all the bits and bytes of the application and the infrastructure.

We see a lot of acceleration and interest in applications delivered as a service via cloud. Security concerns also require new demands on capacity and resource planning, on automation, and orchestration of all the bits and bytes of the application and the infrastructure.

The third way that we wanted to address was a dedicated application environment. These are data warehousing, analytics types of workloads, and collaboration workloads, where performance is really critical, and you want that not on shared resources, but in a dedicated way. But, you also want to make sure that that is supporting applications in a cloud or virtual environment.

So in 2011, it's about how to bring that portfolio together in the solution to solve those three problems. The key thing is that we didn't want to extend sprawl and continue the problem that’s still out there in the marketplace. We wanted to do all that on one common architecture, one common management model, and one common security model.

If you look at this trend toward integration and convergence, and you see some of the answers out there in the marketplace, you’ll see, for example, unique architectural stacks dedicated to a data warehouse environment or a BI environment. Then, you’ll see a completely different physical and software architecture for a virtual environment.

Then, if you look at cloud, you see a whole other island of different tools, different parts, different pieces. With our converged infrastructure strategy, we had the opportunity to do something really special here.

Individual Solutions

What if we could take that common architecture management security model, optimize it, integrate it into individual solutions for those three different application sets and do it on the stuff that customers are already using in the legacy application environment today and they could have something really special?

What we’re announcing today at Discover is this new portfolio we called Converged Systems. For that virtual workload, we have VirtualSystems or the dedicated application environment, specifically BI, and data management and information management. We have the AppSystems portfolio. Then, for where most customers want to go in the next few years, cloud, we announced the CloudSystem.

So, those are three portfolios, where common architecture addresses a complete continuum of customer’s application demands. What's unique here is doing that in a common way and being built on some of the best-of-breed technologies on the planet for virtualization, cloud, high performance BI, and analytical applications.

Gardner: This is an example where truly converged infrastructure has now gotten us to the level where we’re looking at not quite business process, but certainly a solution set and some very powerful capabilities now being executed on at that level.

Let's just quickly dig into one of those levels because it intrigued me. It was from the Vertica acquisition. We now, basically have a data warehouse, big data, real-time crunching capability, and a modern architecture designed just for that, but placed on the converged infrastructure. Tell me why that’s important and why that could be a game changer when it comes to analytics?

With the demands of big everything, the speed and scale at which the economy is moving the business, and competition is moving, you've got to have this stuff in real-time.

Newton: There are a couple of things. You hit on two points there. One is Vertica software, in and of itself. The architecture is one of the most modern architectures out there today to handle the analytics in real time.

Before, analytics in a traditional BI data warehouse environment was about reporting. Call up the IT manager, give them some criteria. They go back and do their wizardry and come back with sort of a status report, and it's just looking at the dataset that’s in one of the data stores he is looking.

It sort of worked, I guess, back when you didn’t need to have that answer tomorrow or next week. You could just wait till the next quarterly review. With the demands of big everything, as Brad was speaking of, the speed and scale at which the economy is moving the business, and competition is moving, you've got to have this stuff in real-time.

So we said, "Let’s go make a strategic acquisition. Let’s get the best-in-class, real-time analytics, a modern architecture that does just that and does it extremely well. And then, let’s combine that with the best hardware underneath that with HP Converged Infrastructure, so that customers can very easily and quickly bring that capability into their environment and apply it in a variety of different ways, whether in individual departments or across the enterprise.

Real-time analytics

There are endless possibilities of ways that you can take advantage of real-time analytics with this solution. Including it into AppSystem makes it very easy to consume, bring it into the environment, get it up and running, start connecting the data sources literally in minutes, and start running queries and getting answers back in literally seconds.

What’s special about this approach is that most analytic tools today are part of a larger data warehouse or BI-centered architecture. Our argument is that in the future of this big everything thing that’s going on, where information is everywhere, you can’t just rely on the data sources inside your enterprise. You’ve got to be able to pull sources from everywhere.

In buying a a monolithic, one-size-fits-all OLTP, data warehousing, and a little bit of analytics, you're sacrificing that real-time aspect that you need. So keep the OLTP environment, keep the data warehouse environment, bring in its best in class real-time analytic on top of it, and give your business very quickly some very powerful capabilities to help make better business decisions much faster.

Gardner: Very good. Jon Mormile, tell me a bit now how these developments we’ve heard from Brad and Jason now come together and are supported by the news around the data center transformation here at Discover.

Mormile: Thanks, Dana. First of all, when you talk about today’s data centers, most of them were built 10 years ago and actually a lot of our analyst’s research talks about how they were built almost 14-15 years ago. These antiquated data centers simply can’t support the infrastructure that today’s IT and businesses require. They are extremely inefficient. More of them require two to three times the amount of power to run the IT, due to inefficient cooling and power distribution systems.

These antiquated data centers simply can’t support the infrastructure that today’s IT and businesses require. They are extremely inefficient.

In addition to these systems, these monolithic data centers are typically over-provisioned and underutilized. Because most companies cannot build new facilities all the time and continually, they have to forecast future capacity and infrastructure requirements that are typically outdated before the data centers are even commissioned.

A lot of our customers are facing similar challenges. As I mentioned, we're talking about the ability to accommodate today’s IT, and there's the lack of scalability. But, they also have other driving factors that are affecting your businesses, such as the ability to build scalar facilities quickly.

They need to reduce construction cost, as well as operational expenses. This places a huge strain on companies' resources and their bottom lines. By not changing their data center strategy, businesses are throttled and simply just can’t compete in today’s aggressive marketplace.

Gardner: What are you doing to help them with that? What’s coming out? I'm intrigued by the EcoPOD, but there is more to it than that.

Mormile: As I mentioned, for some of these challenges that customers are facing today, HP absolutely has a solution. It’s basically surrounding our modular computing portfolio and it helps to solve these problems.

Modular computing

Our modular computing portfolio started about three years ago, when we first took a look at and modified an actual shipping container, turning it into a Performance Optimized Data Center (POD).

This was followed by continuous innovation in the space with new POD designs, the deployment of our POD-Works facility, which is the world’s first assembly line data centers, the addition of flexible data center product, and today, with our newest edition, the POD 240A, which gives all the benefits of a container data center without sacrificing traditional data center look and feel.

Also, with the acquisition of EYP, which is now HP Critical Facilities Services, and utilizing HP Technical Services, we are able to offer a true end-to-end data center solution from planning and installation of the IT and the optimized infrastructure go with it, to onsite maintenance and onsite support globally.

Gardner: So, we really have a continuum here. We're talking about AppSystems, where we've got appliances running specific apps, some of the Microsoft SQL databases, some of the SAP, ERP implementations, and then we are going in a concerted fashion down into the infrastructure, talking about virtualization, and then right into the facilities, where we have these PODs and modular approaches with efficiencies built in for cooling and energy conservation.

It's sort of end-to-end, but what’s fascinating to me, and I'd like your take on this, Jon, is that it doesn’t have to be adopted all at once. This is something that you have many different entry points.

You're talking about taking that IT and those innovations and then taking it to the next level.

Depending on the specifics of your enterprise, your service provider, whatever stage of development and maturity you are at, there is a way for you to jump on board, but at least you can start taking action. That, I think, is the key here. Jon, can you speak about the ability to jump in at any point, but still makes a significant progress?

Mormile: That’s basically the whole basis of a modular computing portfolio and converged infrastructure. HP can deliver the server, storage, and networking solution. We actually offer these solutions to 8 out of the 10 leading social media companies.

When you combine in-house rack and power engineering, delivering finely tuned solutions to meet customers’ growing power and rack needs, it all comes together. You're talking about taking that IT and those innovations and then taking it to the next level as far as integrating that into a turnkey solution, which should actually be a POD or modular data center product.

You take the POD, and then you talk about the Factory Express services where we are actually able to take the IT integrate it into a POD, where you have the server, storage, and networking. You have integrated applications, and you've cabled and tested it.

The final step in the POD process is not only that we're providing Factory Express services, but we're also providing POD-Works. At POD-Works, we take the integrated racks that will be installed in the PODs and we provide power, networking, as well as chilled water and cooling to that, so that every aspect of the turnkey data center solution is pre-configured and pre-tested. This way, customers will have a fully integrated data center shipped to them. All they need to do is plug-in the power, networking, and/or add chilled water to that.

Game changer

Being able to have a complete data center on site up and running in a little as six weeks is a tremendous game changer in the business, allowing customers to be more agile and more flexible, not only with their IT infrastructure needs, but also with their capital and operational expense.

When you bring all that together, PODs offer customers the ability to deploy fully integrated, high performing, efficient scalable data centers at somewhere around a quarter of the cost and up to 95 percent more efficient, all the while doing this 88 percent faster than they can with traditional brick and mortar data center strategies.

Gardner: Jason, going to you now, pretty much the same question. We have this comprehensive ability. We have a much more rapid physical plant capability. This now allows for people to come in at different points in their maturity, but still have a roadmap or vision of how to get to a converged infrastructure, a transformed data center. What’s the process that you encounter at that AppSystem level, where people can get involved quickly? What would you recommend that they do first?

Newton: That depends on the customer. The whole point of the Converged System portfolio is that if you like the concept of a converged infrastructure and you want to get there, we have a very simple, flexible, optimized answer for you, for workload, virtual cloud, and dedicated application environment.

As to where a customer can start, go back and look at what your business priorities are, and your level of maturity. We've got quite a few experts that will sit down to talk to you and assess where you are in that continuum. The best place to start is what is your business asking for and what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are the outcomes? What can you deliver? That's the place to go.

The best place to start is what is your business asking for and what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What are the outcomes? What can you deliver?

A reason someone would be looking at apps is because someone in the business is saying, "I need to make much better decisions much faster." Maybe it's supply chain decisions or it could be something in retail. Or, "I need to do some better financial analysis or make better offers to my banking customers. And, I need something much more powerful than just the data that I have, and we need to do it very quickly."

I would say to look at a Vertica real-time analytic system or a data warehouse solution that we've co-developed in Microsoft. That would be a perfect place to start. The good news is that if your next priority, after getting that software in the business, is you get that virtual environment more cleaned up and running more efficiently, more optimized and simplified in terms of management, VirtualSystem would be your next step.

If you're already doing a lot of virtualization today with HP on BladeSystem, on 3PAR, or on our LeftHand technology, I would say to build on that same architecture, keep all that in place, and upgrade that to a complete CloudSystem environment.

There are a lot of entry points. It really depends on the business priority at what you are trying to do. The good news of this approach is that you can come in at any point and you can scale and and extend and know that when you solve those different application needs, you're going to be doing it in a common way, not sacrificing best of class.

Gardner: We should also point out, Jason, that at Discover here we're seeing a lot of professional services and support announcements as well that dovetail and supplement these other announcements. Maybe you could give us a very quick recap of where the professional services kick in, and perhaps that's also a starting point.

Start services

Newton: You're right. There is a multitude of those at this show. We have some new professional services. I call them start services. We have an AppStart, a CloudStart, and a VirtualStart service. These are the services, where we can engage with the customer, sit down, and assess their level of maturity -- what they have in place, what their goals are.

These services are designed to get each of these systems into the environment, integrated into what you have, optimized for your goals and your priorities, and get this up and running in days or weeks, versus months and years that that process would have taken in the past for building and integrating it. We do that very quickly and simply for the customer.

We have got a lot of expertise in these areas that we've been building on the last 20 years. Just like we're doing on the hardware-software application side simplifications, these start services do the same thing. That extends to HP Solutions support, which then kicks in and helps you support that solution across that lifecycle.

There is a whole lot more, but those are two really key ones that customers are excited about this week.

Gardner: Brad Parks, you've been hearing from Jason and Jon. They supplement and support what you are doing in storage. But, when it comes to getting started, do you have any recommendations, whether it's professional services or some sort of a path or model for working the storage transformation and modernization process into these other larger activities around, AppSystems and facilities?

The combination of our portfolio and our expertise is really going to help our customers drive that success and embrace convergence.

Parks: The approach is very consistent across the board. Converged Storage is a foundational building block that is materialized inside the VirtualSystem, CloudSystem, and AppSystem, those internal part of that larger converged data center that Jon talked about. Along that way, you can have different entry points ,and we certainly have a full set of services to help people get started.

One of the things that we announced this week is the Technology Services Organization. HP recently did a complete reinvention of their consulting portfolio.

As we've seen customers trying to modernize their storage infrastructure and take advantage of some of these converged storage trends, they have responded with a set of workshops, start services, to get people down that path, as well as enterprise services for those customers who are looking to start to bridge between internal IT and cloud environments that might be hosted externally. Our HP 3PAR Utility Storage platform is now a standard offering as an outsourced storage service within enterprise services.

Last, we know that internal IT folks have to upscale and continually learn these new technologies, so that they can feed those back into their business. HP ExpertONE has recently come out with a full set of training and certification courseware to help our channel partners, as well as internal IT folks that are customers, to learn about these new storage elements and to learn how they can take these architectures and help transform their information management processes.

Gardner: Let's go to Helen Tang for the last word today. Helen, based on the research that you’ve conducted and the fact that we have these large trends, some organizations are working towards cloud-computing models, for example, more rapidly than others. Some organizations focus just on converting apps and modernizing them, or perhaps adopting appliance models.

These services are designed to get each of these systems into the environment, integrated into what you have, optimized for your goals and your priorities, and get this up and running in days or weeks.

What is it about the research and the fact that there are so many different ways the organizations need to react rather to these trends that makes sort of the über view of what's been announced this week such a good fit?

Tang: Clearly, ever since HP launched our Converged Infrastructure strategy and portfolio in 2009, we’ve seen great traction among the analyst community, and more importantly, our customers. We’ve helped over 1,000 customers on different stages of this journey, taking their existing data center environments and transforming them, so they can embrace convergence and be able to maximize the enterprise agility that we talked about earlier.

This set of announcements that we’re talking about in the show this week, and hopefully, for the remainder of this year, are significant additions in each of their own markets, having the potential to transform, for example, storage, shaking up an industry that’s been pretty static for the last 20 years by offering completely new architecture design for the world we live in today.

That’s the kind of innovation we’ll drive across the board with our customers and everybody that talked before me has talked about the service offering that we also bring along with these new product announcements. I think that’s key. The combination of our portfolio and our expertise is really going to help our customers drive that success and embrace convergence.

Gardner: Very good. You’ve been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction with the HP Discover 2011 Conference on some major news around Converged Infrastructure and data center transformation. There is lots more information available through the various landing pages, and press reports on these events this week.

I’d like to thank our guests for adding some more context, depth, and analysis. We’ve been joined by Helen Tang, Solutions Lead for Data Center Transformation and Converged Infrastructure Solutions. We’ve also been joined by Jon Mormile, Worldwide Product Marketing Manager for Performance-Optimized Data Centers And, Jason Newton, Manager of Announcements and Events for HP ESSN, and as well as Brad Parks, Converged Infrastructure Strategist for HP Storage. Thanks to you all.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks also to our listeners, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion in conjunction HP Discover 2011 on how HP's converged infrastructure strategy supports data center transformation and applications modernization. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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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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