Appistry Launches Cloud Management Solution

Appistry, a cloud infrastructure software provider, has added a new management solution to its product line that enables enterprises to deliver and manage cloud computing services more quickly and easily.

Appistry's new CloudIQ Manager is a cloud application management solution that allows the simple drag-and-drop of resources between cloud environments. Indeed, as companies migrate their heterogeneous applications to cloud-based environments, Appistry CloudIQ Manager provides a single point of application management across the enterprise, said Samuel Charrington, vice president of product marketing and management at Appistry.

"Enterprises won't embrace cloud computing until somebody helps them deal with the numerous applications they already have," said Kevin Haar, CEO of Appistry, in a statement.”Today's cloud is built for single application startups. In order for enterprises to view cloud as something more than an experiment, they need an approach for migrating and managing more than one application. We provide that with CloudIQ Manager." 

Charrington said there has been a gap in terms of tools for managing the cloud environment. "Tooling around the cloud has been focused on the single application and not on the hundreds of applications that need to be managed" when an enterprise migrates to the cloud, he said.

In addition to introducing its new management solution, Appistry also renamed its flagship product from Appistry Enterprise Application Framework (EAF) to Appistry CloudIQ Platform. The technology is now in its fourth generation, and Appistry CloudIQ Platform 4 will be available in the spring, Charrington said. Appistry CloudIQ Platform will be available through Appistry's network of public cloud provider partners, including Amazon, GoGrid and Skytap.

The CloudIQ Platform helps enterprises more intelligently deliver applications utilizing public and private clouds and is used by customers such as FedEx, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and GeoEye.

Charrington said delivering the Appistry solution as two distinct products, Appistry CloudIQ Manager and CloudIQ Engine, "makes it easier for folks to buy and utilize our product line," because users who only need to use the management features can do so.

Despite the changes, Appistry is continuing to price the products on an annual subscription basis. CloudIQ Manager is available for $299 per core per year, while the "Manager + Engine" bundle is priced at $1,599 per core per year, which is the same price Appistry charged for EAF, Charrington said.

The new Appistry CloudIQ Manager features extensible support for existing applications, application portability across a variety of public and private clouds, unified management of applications and services across cloud environments, automated management and migration across clouds, and open and extensible APIs.

Charrington said enterprises with Java, .NET, Spring or legacy code can create scalable, service-oriented applications and move them to the cloud more easily with Appistry. In addition, Appistry provides an extensible model for supporting existing applications and includes out-of-the-box templates for supporting various frameworks such as Tomcat and others.