PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 26, 2012) - CliQr Technologies, the company that enables existing business applications to fluidly move to and between clouds, today came out of stealth mode and unveiled its CloudCenter product. Founded by executives with decades of experience in pioneering cloud computing, virtualization, security and systems management, CliQr simplifies the process of on-boarding, testing and securely running applications on the cloud, allowing businesses to take full advantage of the real power and elasticity that cloud computing offers.
CliQr's CloudCenter™ solution delivers complete visibility and control over a company's cloud environment, enabling the continuous optimization of both runtime and price performance of any application on one or among many clouds. With investors that include Google Ventures and Foundation Capital, CliQr is emerging from over 1.5 years spent refining its revolutionary cloud application management platform and monitoring the success of early production customers.
"Clouds will change the way businesses think about interacting with information resources," said Gaurav Manglik, co-founder and CEO of CliQr Technologies. "To date, we have experienced the era of Cloud 1.0, one app, one cloud. What is needed for the next generation of the cloud is for any app to work with any cloud or a combination of clouds seamlessly and securely. CliQr enables this new era of Cloud 2.0, and we expect it to be one of the tipping points for cloud adoption by global businesses."
Business Applications Importance and Growth
Today, business applications are more compute-intensive, handle larger amounts of data, and often have a highly variable workload as experienced by large user activity swings. While applications can scale up and down, most IT infrastructures cannot. Rigid data center resources either limit application performance or require IT staff to overbuild in order to accommodate peak loads. According to Gartner, there were almost 10 million servers purchased in 2011 and it is not uncommon that 75-85 percent of the datacenter servers are purchased for peak-load periods only. International Data Corp. (IDC) estimates that there is more than $140 billion in server overcapacity or what equates to about a three year supply of servers, largely driven by the fact that most servers run at only 5-15 percent of CPU utilization.
Between the cost of acquiring and managing these excess IT resources, billions of dollars are unnecessarily wasted each year. Despite the cloud's promise of resources on demand, adoption has been slow and prohibitively difficult due to many friction points. These include requirements for recoding applications; large teams for professional services; and the fear of making choices today that will lock in enterprises and limit their agility in the future.
"As enterprises begin to migrate workloads to the cloud, one of the biggest challenges is to maintain the same level of performance and security as they were running in the traditional IT environment without compromising costs," said Agatha Poon, Research Manager, Global Cloud Computing at the 451 Group. "Platforms that are designed to bridge the migration gap, enabling simple, cost-effective on-boarding regardless of application type and cloud model will help accelerate enterprise cloud adoption," Poon added.
Getting to the Cloud has Been Difficult for Businesses
To date, most cloud efforts have been focused around building out individual cloud infrastructure or developing small numbers of new applications designed to support a single cloud. There have been no solutions that simplify the way the majority of existing business apps can easily, securely and fluidly move to and between clouds without disruption and high cost. The challenges associated with moving these applications to the cloud have been:
- Expensive, complex migration. Complex provisioning, writing code, and creating virtual machine images to coordinate with the specific processes of each cloud provider. Once completed for one cloud, the costly work needs to be repeated again when moving to another cloud.
- Uncertainty of application performance. Most existing applications were not written to live on clouds. Today, even after a tedious migration, it is not known how well the applications will perform on various clouds or cloud configurations. It is not uncommon for applications to run considerably worse on a cloud than in an on-premise datacenter.
- The burden and cost of ongoing operations and management. Companies have found it more costly and unpredictable to run their application and storage on someone else's infrastructure resulting in higher management costs in addition to cloud fees.
- Security concerns. In public cloud environments, security is a shared responsibility. Both the end user and the cloud provider must ensure that the infrastructure is secure and private enough for enterprise use.
CliQr CloudCenter™
If Cloud 1.0 has been about brute force migration to get to one cloud, then Cloud 2.0 is about delivering the real vision of cloud computing having any application move to and work with any private, public or hybrid cloud fluidly, securely, and optimized for performance with no migration disruption or expense. CliQr's CloudCenter product makes this possible by delivering:
- Rapid On-boarding -- CliQr's CloudCenter Orchestrator and its unique CloudBlade™ technology allows different applications to work with different private or public clouds without either having to be changed. On-boarding can now often occur in a day.
- Run on Any Cloud -- Whether during initial deployment or at any time in the future, CloudCenter allows the application to seamlessly move from one cloud to another avoiding any cloud lock-in.
- Optimized Performance -- CloudCenter's benchmarking capabilities enable businesses to assess the price and performance of any application on any number of clouds or cloud configurations and once the best fit is identified, the application can be launched on that cloud in a single click. CloudCenter provides businesses with a 5-10x runtime
price-performance advantage over existing cloud migration tools or professional services methodologies.
- Managed -- CloudCenter provides a single intuitive dashboard that manages all factors associated with deploying, running and moving applications on clouds.
- Secure -- CliQr provides a unique end-to-end layer of security that addresses the unique challenges of the cloud.
CliQr's solution for cloud computing creates value for the entire cloud ecosystem. These include businesses looking to enjoy resources on-demand that the elasticity of the cloud provides; independent software vendors seeking a new delivery medium and a means for decoupling IT equipment from the value of their applications; as well as cloud providers looking for a tipping point in rapid adoption.
Availability
CliQr's CloudCenter product is currently available. For details please go to http://cliqrtech.com. Please check out the CliQr demo video here.
About CliQr Technologies
CliQr Technologies™ is a leading provider of cloud application management solutions. CliQr simplifies the process of on-boarding, testing and securely running applications on the cloud for today's businesses to take full advantage of the real power and elasticity that cloud computing offers. CliQr's CloudCenter™ solution delivers complete visibility and control over a company's cloud environment, enabling the continuous optimization of both runtime and price performance of any application on one or among many clouds.
Headquartered in Mountain View, California, CliQr Technologies is privately held and backed by leading venture capital companies including Google Ventures and Foundation Capital. To learn more, visit http://CliQrtech.com.
CliQr Technologies, CliQr CloudCenter and CloudBlades, are trademarks of CliQr Technologies, Inc. All other registered or unregistered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.
Contact Information:
Media Contact
Michael Kellner
BOCA Communications
(415) 834-5171 X16
michael@bocacommunications.com