Rakesh Malhotra
VP of Products for cloud platform provider Apprenda overseeing overall product strategy, roadmap and market execution. Previously ten years leading Microsoft’s virtualization and datacenter management products as a Principal Group Program Manager on the core engineering team. In this role, Rakesh had a front row seat in the evolution of the modern datacenter and its ongoing journey to what we now call cloud. Passionate about all things cloud related, Rakesh has deep expertise and experience building products for enterprise customers. He advises a variety of cloud startups and is actively engaged in the enterprise technology community in the NYC area where he is based.
Best of Breed versus Polyglot Revisited
If you feel that PaaS is a new-age devops/application management tool, like any management tool user or vendor, you’ll want maximum breadth of coverage. Nobody wants multiple monitoring, backup, deployment or configuration management solutions for each platform or application in their environment. Heterogeneous breadth coverage with the ever elusive “single pane of glass” is the [...]
Top Five Challenges Facing Enterprise Application Developers
Several common themes have emerged from discussions with a broad array of enterprise developers. In this post, I’ll share some of what I’ve been hearing. I would love to get your feedback. 1) Cloud Apps are Hard to Get Right – While abstraction of infrastructure has helped agility and application management, it doesn’t make it [...]
The Truth About Lock In
Last week I was invited to speak at a Microsoft conference in Redmond about building cloud applications for portability across clouds and infrastructure. In my presentation, I approached the issue of application portability from the enterprise perspective. This means that developers generally are not choosing servers, clouds or other infrastructure components. Developers focus on building [...]
PaaS and Mobile Enterprise – Real Conversations with Customers
One of the benefits of working on cutting edge technology like PaaS is that I get to have conversations with enterprise customers about the transformations that PaaS will bring. Increasingly, I’m seeing lots of interest in the intersection of PaaS and mobile enterprise (yeah, it’s not just an attempt by me to put together two buzzwords!). [...]
Moving PaaS Beyond the Sound Bites in 2013
Most of the discussion around PaaS these days tends to focus on the rapid application deployment capabilities. That’s the easiest thing to demo in a 3-minute video so it tends to get the headlines. I believe that in 2013 we will move on from this eye candy and dig into some of the higher value [...]
The Best PaaS is one that is Being Used
Often I hear that the enterprise is “starting to warm up to PaaS” spoken as though adoption in the enterprise is purely a function of the customer’s readiness. Obviously an enterprise must adjust its IT world view in order to truly embrace PaaS. PaaS is at least as much a cultural change as it is [...]
Enterprise Hybrid Clouds and Reverse Cloud Washing
The vast majority of enterprises that I talk to believe that the natural end state for cloud computing is a hybrid one. This means a combination of public/private/IaaS/PaaS/SaaS depending upon the needs of the business and the economics of the situation. Not surprisingly, this has caused legacy vendors to engage in large-scale cloud washing in [...]
