On the second day of Demo 09, one of the products that caught my attention was AppZero. In my early days at Cloud Avenue, I wrote a post arguing that it is important to prevent vendor lock-in to ensure the success of Cloud Computing. In that post, Phil Clarke from CohesiveFT pointed out that such lock-ins can be avoided by the use of virtual appliances and how their elastic server service helps in avoiding such lock-ins. AppZero goes one step further and makes it very easy to create, control and maintain applications by virtualizing the application environment than the server itself. When I say even your grandma can run Enterprise IT, I mean it. Check out the following video of their launch in Demo ‘09 and you will understand what I am talking about.

AppZero abstracts the complexity associated with the underlying OS and hardware for any application and make the application completely portable. Application portability is much better than the server portability using virtual machines. When you install an application to a server, it installs dependencies and other associated libraries coupling the application deeply with the installed OS. This makes it very difficult to manage and, worse, move the applications from one datacenter environment to another. AppZero takes a neat approach by inserting a layer between the applications and OS. Instead of installing the app on the OS, AppZero allows you to install the apps on Virtual Application Appliances (VAA). VAA, now, contains the application, its configuration and any libraries needed for the functioning of the app, thereby, taking away the dependency issues associated with an OS or hardware environment. This not only makes it easy for users to manage their applications, it also makes it easy to move from one datacenter to another. If you watched their video above, you would have noticed how their software makes such a move just drag and drop with a few clicks. They do the heavy lifting in the background, leaving you with few clicks on the front-end. This makes server migrations and consolidation a child’s play.

The arrival of companies like CohesiveFT and AppZero is changing the way IT is done, by offering higher ROI for the enterprises and, also, by helping relatively smaller companies enjoy the enterprise level IT.