The latest Gartner survey predicts that by 2012 some 20% of businesses will have no on-premise IT to speak of. But if that is to happen, one of the major underlying problems for users of cloud services – what happens if a service provider fails as a business, leaving its customers without a service – has to be not only addressed but resolved.
This is one of the most common questions potential cloud services users ask, and to date the sum total of answers from the industry seem to come down to the simple statement – `you’re screwed’. That position is one of the factors stopping businesses making the move to a service provisioned model.
Last week Peter Bauert, CFO of Seattle-based cloud services company, Parallels, demonstrated how the annuity business model inherent in the cloud makes it easy for another business to assess the costs and value of stepping in and taking over a failed business, maintaining a service for its customers. But that still leaves the technical issue of porting both the data and the business processes.
The solution to this may be a good deal easier than expected, and indeed easier than Parallels’ CTO, Matt Domo, had actually considered.
In his job as CTO, Domo plays an important role in the development of the Application Packaging Standard (APS). This has been around for some two and a half years, currently has over 200 applications that comply with it and four or five service providers signed up. According to Domo, it is growing and is proving attractive for the smaller, specialist software vendors. “The website has a catalogue of all the applications available,” he said. “This is designed to simplify the distribution issue for vendors as users can simply download them from the website.”
The essence of APS is that it packages up all the necessary information about an application running in a shared services environment. This can then be used to load the application on to any suitable platform. Every application has resources associated with it, such as physical requirements like server specifications and software provisioning requirements, a management console, licencing keys management, and billing requirements. All of these surround the code but do not change it at all; that is what APS covers.
It consists of metadata that describes the physical and software resources, together with the order in which they are orchestrated, management consoles and integration with core systems such as licencing. “It just packages up these requirements so that the application can be plugged into a wide variety of systems,” Domo said. “The application is a lightbulb and APS is the socket.”
It is this basic approach that makes APS a candidate to be the `portal’ for users of any (APS compliant) service that has failed as a business. It has the potential to provide a life-raft for their applications and data, so they can be rescued and find a new home for their environment. Taken together with the on-going revenue stream that the annuity business model it provides, APS could help other service providers take on failed lines of businesses, for it would give them the ability to easily move the applications onto their own environment.
According to Domo most end user agreements set out the data retention policy should the business fail. This provides time for the customer to recover their data from the failed business, and is a contractual obligation the creditors cannot give away or sell.
“I sure as heck would want both levels of guarantee,” Domo said. “I would want something in the licence that tells me that, should that happen, I can get access. Second it has to be possible. The data is typically application specific, so the applications vendor themselves can bundle in another resource, an .EXE utility that can be listed in the resources installed by APS. And we would just provision it like any other resource. The technical piece here is making it easy to import and export data. Installing importer and exporter utilities into APS can be done.”
But APS holds out the prospect of not only moving data but also the essential business processes.
“I think it is part of the story,” he said. “There are businesses that provide import/export utilities which can be bundled in as part of the resources APS provisions, but it is up to the service provider to make that decision. It will be very much tied to the business processes of the individual businesses. The best you can do it find a generic way for people to import utilities or declare interfaces to other applications that can be used so that they can get that data.”
This points to a subtle choice for APS members. Should they just hint at the possibility or be more assertive in promoting it? After all, Parallels is making a conscious effort to re-position itself away from being a provider of software `things’ for cloud services to providing an end-to-end package of services aimed at the small business market. This is a sector where anything that eases choice and decision making is liable to be a winner. Arguably, the one piece missing from Parallels’ package is the element of on-going business assurance.
“So you’re suggesting that we get a requirement into the bundle that says, if you want to be standards compliant you have to provide it? That is something we could look at, making it a requirement. But you could also do it without any involvement from us, such as giving an example of how users can do it,” he said. “We can put some examples of how to do that in the sample code. We have to be a bit careful because it is an open standard and we need to work with the rest of the community. But it can be done without any input from us. It could make a good addition.”
Domo sees particular advantages for software vendors in the development of APS. “There are thousands of apps packages out there and while the vendors know the cloud is real they all face the challenge of transitioning their businesses from the old to the new,” he said. “Today they are building for a single platform - a single server. But the challenge is in not only moving that to a SaaS model but providing the reliability that customers require.
“For example, one of the problems with SaaS in the US can be that if the host datacentre is on the west coast, east coast users pay a half second penalty in latency. The ideal, for both the software vendor and at least some of the user community, would be to have a distributed network of datacentres across the country. Setting that up, however, can be a problem. But with APS the vendors get a regional network from the start.”
He is well aware that the ISVs still have to cater for the shrink-wrap market, but sees APS as a way for them to face up to the problems of getting into the new market. APS means they can package up their applications, with little or no modification or additional code, and be in a position to form partnerships with existing service providers. This can help solve their distribution and market reach problems as they move into the new market model.
The latest version of APS also allows service providers to start aggregating services, bundling applications code and externally sourced services together to form packages aimed at defined applications areas such as messaging.
And as for the future direction of APS? “We’re still figuring it out,” Domo replied with a smile. “There is a steering committee and we meet regularly. With the latest Version 1.2 the big problem we addressed was the licencing keys management issues. Single sign-on and identity management look like being the next likely targets, though nothing is yet finalised. But we are driving towards a Version 2.0 being finalised by the end of 2010.”
Problem
Posted by DeshaunR on Mon, 15/03/2010 - 09:18I don't think that would be a problem. The future has still lot in-stored for us. Many technologies are still waiting to be discovered such as the Google Apps Marketplace is waiting to be filled up by many applictions.
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