A company that started out with the objective of building private platform as a service (PaaS) for Java is now beta testing a strategy for applying the Amazon model to private clouds.
"We've learned that although the market for PaaS is still evolving, customers really want a choice in how they consume services and how they consume cloud services," said Mike Soby, CEO of Santa Clara, Calif.-based CumuLogic. "That led us to look at what Amazon was doing and understand those success factors. We did a fairly significant pivot away from the notion of PaaS-only and toward the notion of open cloud services. If you look at the Amazon model, the modularity and ease-of-use makes a big difference to their customers."
CumuLogic intends to leverage its new product, Platform 2.0, to replicate those benefits for the private cloud, providing containers, databases, load-balancing, caching and similar functionalities. "Users can describe what they want and then have the platform go do it for them," he said. "So what we've done is to deconstruct this in a modular way and offer a suite of cloud services that work for any cloud and provide the user modular choices that can be managed from a single-pane console."
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The company is targeting both the enterprise and service provider markets. Soby feels that as CumuLogic's product moves through beta testing, it will become an ideal opportunity for the channel.
"These organizations are trying to figure out how to sell up the stack and sell more services to differentiate themselves," he said. "So with our platform, they can light up all these services based on their needs. It's a very compelling value proposition that helps channel partners move beyond compute and disk toward a higher level of services. They can private label it and use it as a foundation for building hybrid clouds."
After the 90 day beta period is successfully complete, pricing will be based on the particular model. "When working with service providers, we charge for initial integration and then do a revenue share to make it very frictionless," Soby explained. "On the enterprise side, we are pricing it at as an annual licensing model."
The company's strategy began to evolve 18 months ago, culminating in a private PaaS offering for Java that was released last summer. But, as CumuLogic's customers were moving toward a shared services delivery model often targeting ITaaS, Soby noticed increased demand for a suite of scalable, on-demand services for their private and hybrid clouds, and he decided to revise his company's road map to meet that need.
"We believe the future of enterprise IT is going to evolve to everything as a- service, and we want to help our customers take that journey," Soby summarized. "A full road map of cloud services will be coming soon."
PUBLISHED FEB. 27, 2013
