StackMob recently teamed up with Rackspace, an open cloud company, to help capitalize on the trend.

“Enterprise for the first time is completely rethinking how they are developing applications, which is very exciting because as far as I’m concerned, this hasn’t happened before,” said StackMob CEO Ty Amell in an interview with SearchSOA.

Amell likened the innovation and growth in the mobile ecosystem to the Industrial Revolution.

“If you look at what happened back in the Industrial Revolution, there were standardizations and factories that allowed people to build things like never before,” said Amell. “Fast forward to today and we have a Tech Revolution… we have all of these BaaS providers with niche services, all providing great services and then we have APIs allowing systems to talk to each other. For the first time we have a standard service.”

Furthermore, Amell said the movement is something that won’t take several years to catch on and more to implement, rather he foresees it as a fast-moving market.

The growth should come as no surprise given that data from Strategy Analytics indicates that over the next five years, revenue associated with mobile workers using enterprise business apps will nearly double.

“Mobile workers have moved beyond just mobile email and messaging to include other collaboration apps such as conferencing, productivity apps such as content authoring, and business process apps such as CRM and even ERP,” said Strategy Analytics director of business cloud strategies Mark Levitt in a statement.

The mobile user space differs from that of traditional Web apps, said Tom Lounibos, SOASTA’s CEO, and so requires new types of tools. “On the mobile side, customers are looking at the difference between mobile apps and web apps. It goes beyond pure footprint. It  goes to how the [devices] are being used.”

“With mobile, you have people on the move. They are usually interested in one thing, say, a sports score, or a transaction. None of the developers have too much visibility into this,” said Lounibos.

He said mPulse garners performance measures like bandwidth and page load time as well as engagement metrics like bounce, exit and conversion rates. User metrics like user location, device type, carrier speed, and application usage are captured too. Then, mPulse displays the information via an interactive in-memory monitoring dashboard.

Why did SOASTA move to buy LogNormal? “The company has been a leader in real user monitoring,” said Lounibos. In fact, LogNormal principals have been involved in the roots and flowering of Real User Measurement (RUM). Co-founders Buddy Brewer and Philip Tellis had roles in developing Boomerang open source RUM software and other JavaScript-oriented monitoring endeavors.

The LogNormal technology employs JavaScript tagging that lets you capture end-user activity to get a better understanding of how devices are interacting with services. “It captures the real user experience,” said Lounibos. That experiential data is fed back to the SOASTA in-memory analytical engine, he continued, which is at the heart of its flagship CloudTest platform.

Mobile development, clearly, is changing the overall development ethos. Just when some test shops were getting their arms around the idea of end-user PC interaction monitoring, they face new challenges of a mobile nature. Not surprisingly, SOASTA’s Lounibos sees it a s a key area of attention, as was seen depicted in a recent posting on sister blog Head in the Clouds. – Jack Vaughan

Be prepared to add another “as a” to the list of Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and so on. Kapow describes its latest edition as the first software platform of its kind to feature “Integration-as-a-Self-Service” through the introduction of lightweight end-user apps. These apps are dubbed ”Kapplets.”

Kapow was early to field a software type that was often described as the “enterprise mashup.” Using XML, it created a Web data extraction tool for getting catalog and other data from the Web, and performing useful transformations on that data. Kapow continues to add to its product base.

Customers such as car maker Audi are able to use the software to generate real-time feeds to an in-car multimedia system without creating dependencies on individual information providers’ custom APIs, according to Rick Kawamura, vice president, marketing, Kapow.

Big consultancies have a tendency to code to APIs, but this doesn’t scale in an era of ‘get it done quick,’ said Kawamura, who sees mobile, social, cloud and big data changing the workplace dynamic. However, IT still does have an important role, at least for now.

Kapow Kapplets are said to put big data more directly into the hands of business users, but the business leaders are required to describe what they need to their IT department, which then uses Kapow Katalyst 9.0 to integrate data and applications. IT then makes Kapplets – displayed as clickable icons – available to workers as part of automated workflow. This lets employees, customers and partners control and run “the automation and integration of disparate systems and data sources.”

Clearly we are in the era of the programmable Web. It may take many forms. Will it be so easily programmable that any interested business person someday could develop against it? What do you think?  – Jack Vaughan

The JBoss EAP 6 is said to provide developers with “a high-performance, low-footprint, easy-to-manage solution designed to help enterprises build applications and ease into the cloud.” Representatives from JBoss and Red Hat touted the new platform’s cloud centric nature, lightweight pluggable architecture, malleability, multicore and virtual systems optimization, upgraded middleware components and the fact that it supports Java EE 6 as well as JVM languages such as Spring, Struts, and Google Web Toolkit.

On the data side, JBoss Data Grid 6 is Red Hat’s offering for dealing with big data issues. “The massive proliferation of data places new demands upon enterprise applications… Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 6 brings a new approach to solving this issue, enabling enterprises to move with agility and with more flexibility than other proprietary approaches.” Explains Craig Muzilla, vice president of middleware at Red Hat.

He and other spokespeople put a number of features of the new system on parade, including its NoSQL approach, real-time application support for big data, flexibility of application integration, high scalability, high availability and fault tolerance. This is said to allow enterprise customers to build an open cloud that can integrate resources from various vendors and maintain a shield against lock-in to any one vendor.

Looking at the third new product in their trifecta, Red Hat claims that CloudForms provides enterprise IT organizations with the tools to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure that will deliver self-service computing resources to end-users, but without giving up control.

That might be changing.  This week, multiple software companies introduced tools aimed at easier management, scalability and integration of Hadoop within the enterprise.

Pervasive Software Inc. rolled out Pervasive Data Integrator v10 – Hadoop Edition, designed to enable users to more easily transfer business data to and from Hadoop-based big data stores. The product addresses the challenging task of flowing non-Hadoop data into Hadoop, a framework often noted for its lack of visual data integration tooling.

Similarly, MapR Technologies Inc. released Version 2.0 of the MapR Distribution, a tool that provides increased monitoring, management, isolation and security for Hadoop. Some of its more notable features include central logging and multi-tenancy support, which both aim to enhance control and visibility of Hadoop data.

Also this week, cloud testing took the fore.

SOASTA announced its CloudTest Mobile platform, providing test automation for iOS, including iOS 6. CloudTest resides inside the app, an approach designed to allow developers to test apps as new mobile operating systems are released.

Also on the testing front, at Cloud Expo in New York, Parasoft Corp. showcased the latest release of Parasoft Virtualize, a service virtualization tool. The product aims to allow development and QA teams easier access to environments needed to test applications.

On another note, UShareSoft announced UForge App Store at the same expo. The platform is a collaborative, multi-cloud app store for enterprise IT applications. With its release, UShareSoft hopes to ease the delivery of software and application to the on-premise cloud. The spread of so-called app stores may betoken a trend of  ‘consumerization’ of IT, as updates are shared using now-familiar Smart phone methods. -Stephanie Mann

“Virtual images are tripling every two years, outpacing the doubling in compute power and essentially flat IT budgets,” IBM Tivoli Software General Manager Sabbah said in a statement coinciding with IBM’s Pulse Conference.

“With current operating practices, every two years you’d need 1.5 times the physical infrastructure to support cloud and twice the labor. That’s an unsustainable cost and management problem which is the exact opposite of the promise of cloud,” he continued, as he outlined benefits of IBM’s new SmartCloud Foundation offerings. While public cloud providers can be expected to ramp up to manage ultra-large configurations, it is more difficult to see how labor issues will affect the much discussed user-side cloud type known as private cloud.

Will work for cycles

The labor issue is a stubborn one, and it must be factored into cloud computing ’what if?’ analyses that enterprise architects are now undertaking. Cost savings are crucial to the dream of cloud, but greater experience with this architecture leads many to downplay cost savings.

Various companies have been working to address the labor issues of cloud, which is a massively scaled architecture that calls for sophisticated and on-demand provisioning of increasingly complex configurations and many virtual images.

The effort suggests that this goes back a long ways. It certainly has been of concern as distributed computing and rack-based blade servers have multiplied. The movement toward grid and autonomic computing looked to address the challenge, and now cloud and even dev ops can be seen contending to solve the problem, but remedies have yet to take hold.

The poster children for the first rush of cloud – Google and Amazon – can be said to have “thrown people at the problem” as they both employed high head counts of developers to service vast farms of servers. And the developers are very advanced developers at that. The classic Google ranch hand is a math and algorithmic wizard who is also adept at systems programming. In Google’s early days, at least, this person combined development and operations skills to a startling degree.

Is cloud computing hugely labor intensive?

We wondered if other companies can repeat this model. So, when we caught up with Skytap’s Brian White at this week’s EclipseCon 2012 in Reston, Virg., we asked for his take. As vice president of products at cloud provider Skytap, White is responsible for product strategy and product management. Before this, he was director of developer resources for Amazon Web and launched the AWS Elastic Beanstalk platform-as-a-service offering. We asked if private cloud labor was not labor intensive.

“It’s hugely labor intensive,” White answered. This is for a reason. “There are things that make [public cloud] a challenge. One is keeping it up and running all the time.” Another, he said, is the fact that the number of servers you can deploy may be relatively modest. “You don’t have unlimited capacity for scaling,” he said.
Where cloud approaches have the most value, White and others have concluded, is where resource needs are unpredictable or irregular. That is why Skytap and many other cloud providers focus on the development and test markets.

Development and test tasks make for a dynamic workload, he said, adding “from a cost perspective you don’t need to have these projects running 24/7.”

For cloud, “there is a huge amount of hype around cost,” said White. “The real benefit people are getting out of it is agility – much more than just pure cost reduction.”

Continuous deployment

While it is largely a beneficial trend, the move to Agile development becomes a factor that further exacerbates the cloud planning dilemma of architects. This was borne home in conversation with Dave West, analyst, Forrester Research, who spoke on Lean development at EclipseCon 2012. He showed that deployment was no longer an end-of-the-Waterfall development lifecycle event. It is now a constant companion. That is because part of the Agile of goal is to deliver bits of functionality as they become available.

The new styles of deployment requirements are certainly an issue with which cloud computing administrators – as well as developers and architects – are going to have to deal. Here, cloud may drive change. It is shedding light on dark problems.

“Cloud is an interesting phenomenon,” said Forrester’s West. “I am excited about what I is doing to drive internal IT to think about its systems in a different way.” – Ryan Punzalan and Jack Vaughan
In the face of fairly rampant fear of placing data on a public cloud, much attention has been placed on private cloud – but labor and cost issues may unsettle such undertakings. What do you think?

The notion arose from our recent SearchSOA.com conversation on SimpleDB with Christopher M. Moyer, vice president of technology at Newstex LLC, who spoke with us on the topic of the Amazon cloud. The topic was no coincidence – Moyer is the author of Building Applications on the Cloud (Addison-Wesley, 2012), a book that neatly describes many  basic patterns of cloud computing based on concrete examples.

”SimpleDB is one of the hardest databases to comprehend,” Moyer said. ”Everyone is used to the idea that, if they write a record to the DB, it will be there. ‘’

But the standard approach of SimpleDB is that marvel: eventual consistency, which is great but unfamiliar to a large legion of developers.

It is a difficult topic for developers to understand and work with in their systems, he told us.

Amazon, like other cloud pioneers, has seen a way toward supporting the familiar, but this too needs special attention.

”They have worked to address [the gap] with a ‘consistent mode,’ but you should be aware that it can affect your performance and stability,” Moyer said.

”Simple is not always simple,” the SearchSOA.com editor said.

That notion may be farfetched. But some of the newer cloud marketplaces bear watching. They may betoken a day when SOA services will be sold and versioned like other online offerings.

Among the so-called cloud marketplaces are aggregating cloud services brokerages like that from AppDirect. The company recently enhanced its online application marketplace, releasing a Marketplace Manager that enables users to oversee the components and settings of cloud services that they offer to the public or third-parties.

AppDirect’s Marketplace Manager lets teams highlight specific apps for specific app consumer types, and enforce quality standards for newly-integrated products. Chat feeds and other mechanisms can give them a near-real-time view of customer issues as they develop, according to Nat Robinson, CMO, AppDirect.
As with much in SaaS and cloud, the early adopters may be from the ranks of SMBs. For small company’s managing many services, app markets may entail unwanted overhead.

Managing apps and cloud services can, in Robinson’s words, become ”a time glut.” People find they must manage provisioning, deprovisioning and so on, he indicated. ”We allow you to manage all your apps in one place,” he said. In terms of advanced interfacing, development teams working with the AppDirect backend can handle integration using REST APIs, he added.

At this point, AppDirect works with Amazon Cloud; Robinson said some private clouds have been implemented as well.

”One of the challenges for companies is to keep up with the pace of mobility. It is difficult – updating [mobile apps] in some cases on a monthly basis,” said Steve Drake, analyst, IDC. That is where the mobile middleware trend gets impetus.

The trend proved vibrant enough this week for IBM to scoop up Israel-based mobile middleware house Worklight for an undisclosed sum.

As part of its ”enterprise mobile application” platform, Worklight supports open source PhoneGap HTML5 and JavaScript cross-platform tools and runtimes. PhoneGap was originated by Nitobi Software, now part of Adobe. Software like Worklight’s is an important addition to IBM’s mobile portfolio.

Growth of mobile and client fragmentation presses IT development resources, said Scott Hebner, Vice President Marketing, IBM Tivoli Software.

”Worklight has an extensive set of libraries. These are APIs that you write to. It supports HTML5, JavaScript, CSS 3, and it supports native [mobile operating systems],” he said. The software will be integrated with existing IBM WebSphere middleware, he indicated.

”It’s a good move for IBM. It really kind of steps up their mobile offerings,” said IDC’s Drake. ”They certainly needed a bit of a boost when it comes to a need for a mobile application platform.”

Clearly, there is an intersection of cloud computing and mobile application underway, and Big Blue’s moves — it has also purchased firms like mobile security manager Big Fix, which last week was officially integrated into IBM with products rebranded as IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager – show it is determined to be a big mobile player.

”One of the big drivers of cloud is mobile. You will see us enable mobility, analytics and cloud across the portfolio,” Hebner said. ”Mobility is a strategic [goal] of IBM.” – Jack Vaughan

In the past Ramji led open-source strategy across Microsoft, and was a founding member of BEA’s AquaLogic product team. He now acts as strategist for Apigee, where, along with others, he writes for the Apigee API Best Practices blog. He likens the token-based OAuth protocol to a valet key that allows users to go from Web site to Web site (from Twitter to TweetDeck, from Facebook to Twitter, from the New York Times to Facebook, and so on) without multiple logins.

”OAuth allows an application to act as an intermediary to services like Twitter – etcetera – on behalf of the end user,” he said. This type of token service for site hopping is a key mark of the Web 2.0 and the so-called ”App Economy” today. “We couldn’t have done this years ago,” said Ramji.

OAuth is said to play nicely with widely used Web-based REST methods. Moreover, Ramji suggested that OAuth makes a ”good enough” security service available to a broader group of developers. The mobile device explosion seems likely to expand OAuth use.

Previous alternatives involve a more complex set of processes for developers to learn. Of course, OAuth has its limits. OAuth aims directly at site-to-site application-to-application hopping over HTTP.  It would be used in some enterprises along with SAML, OpenID and other more complex security services located as gateways nearer to vital backend systems.

OAuth can be seen as an indicator of a sea change in services, said Ramji. ”It is as a token-based security system that allows users’ account information to be used by a third-party application in a way that does not expose the user name and password to that application.”

What can go wrong? ”The process of wiring up OAuth is pretty complicated for the average developer,” said Ramji. ”Also, it is still a spec in motion. No two apps really quite line up easily.”

That is the opening for Apigee. The company has built a single, simple API to talk to multiple end-services, he said. The hosted offering acts as a service broker that handles requests on your behalf. Developers can use Ruby, Objective C, Java and JavaScript to call the Apigee OAuth API that supported -when announced in August - Salesforce REST, Chatter, LinkedIn and Twitter APIs – with more to come.

Apigee’s work is emblematic of the work of API-intensive companies that may change the economics of the software industry. –Jack Vaughan