Q&A with Rajesh Ramchandani of CumuLogic

VSM: The popularity of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has risen dramatically over the past year. Do you think the PaaS industry has been keeping up with the demands of developers and enterprises?

RR: I think there is a huge gap in the application platform side of cloud computing that very few companies have tried to address. Most PaaS offerings in the market today do not provide developers and enterprises with the flexibility needed in web development. Users are not able to customize their platforms, which often causes them to be locked-in to the platform or limited to use the services provided by the platform. We constantly hear from enterprises about their requirement to run private clouds and we will be one of the first ones to provide such a solution, which hopefully will drive further adoption of PaaS in the enterprise.

VSM: Are there specific use cases that are driving the deployment of PaaS?

RR:  Absolutely! One of the most common scenarios are large enterprises that need to deploy brand new applications and realize the old model of siloed applications is too expensive to maintain. They see PaaS and cloud computing in general as a way to future-proof their IT investments. Once they have a PaaS they’ll likely want to consolidate a number of existing applications.

VSM: There are a variety of PaaS providers that support multiple languages, including Java. What are the benefits of a platform that is solely dedicated to Java developers?

RR: CumuLogic is focused on Java applications, of which companies have invested heavily over a number of years. Instead of rewriting applications to fit new platforms and giving up application components on which companies might have standardized over time, we wanted to give our customers the flexibility to keep using those components, from application platforms to databases. Java is still ubiquitous in medium to large enterprises and our potential customers tell us they want a Java PaaS. The PaaS framework we built is flexible enough to extend to any other languages enterprises will require, so our PaaS won’t be limited to Java.

VSM: There are quite a few PaaS vendors in the market. Tell me three reasons why customers should consider CumuLogic PaaS.

RR: Three key benefits we’d like your readers to remember are:

1. End-to-end managed infrastructure services for Java apps. By end-to-end, it means traversing public to private clouds.  Our enterprise customers want to deploy private clouds and use public clouds for limited workloads, and in order to achieve this, they need a comprehensive PaaS solution across private and public clouds.
2. CumuLogic PaaS allows mix-and-match of infrastructure components including traditional apps servers and SQL databases to the modern NoSQL databases and frameworks. This functionality allows users to retain existing investments in the middleware if they choose to migrate existing apps to the cloud. We give choice rather than a one-size-fits-all PaaS.
3. Application portability across cloud vendors. Our users asked for a PaaS for VMware vSphere deployments, and that’s what we support together with other IaaS platforms such as Cloud.com (acquired by Citrix in July 2011), Eucalyptus and OpenStack (coming soon). Not only do we support all these IaaS clouds, but we make it seamless to move from one vendor cloud to another, so our customers are not locked-into any particular IaaS vendor.