fantasy vc - apprenda

Considering the press and recent funding round for my friends at Apprenda, it seems a bit disingenuous to fantasy vc them. But no matter.

I’ve been convinced of their success since the first explanation of the product and target. There were plenty of PaaSes at the time, but they were mostly targeted at developers and mostly public. Press releases from analysts firms like this notwithstanding, the market wasn’t taking off and didn’t look like it was going to take off any time soon.

Put these things together:

• There is a lot of in house development in the enterprise—though no one knows how much exactly, it’s at least enough to support a couple of private PaaS players
• That development is mostly Java or .NET on Linux or Windows
• And it runs on fleets of servers, storage, networking, and data centers that are not at end of life
• What’s developed is custom apps for core business/ops, paperwork apps, extensions to COTS with SDKs, glue to connect together these things and/or legacy apps and/or cloud apps and/or cloud services and/or…
• There was and is very little “private” PaaS competition
• There was no private PaaS for .NET applications at the time that I knew of and there are only a few today 
• There was little that provided the experience of a distributed runtime on prem out of the box
• Virtualization is not required
• Apprenda was (and is still the only?) private PaaS supporting .NET that doesn’t predicate itself on some hypervisor

You offer a runtime, so you may or may not have VMs--but who cares since what you need to expose is the runtime, a management console for that runtime, and (hopefully) APIs to connect to and operate it

- me, provided vs exposed

To me, that last point was the killer. Before the renewed popularity in [the old technology of] containers, Apprenda leveraged Linux container tech and figured out how to get a workalike on Windows to underpin their PaaS. Thus totally foregoing the overhead of hypervisors and the overhead of VMware’s margin.

That's not to say that they're guaranteed success. Or won't get crushed by an incumbent or other party. Or even scooped up before they become too successful. Just that I would've placed that bet.

Disclosure: Apprenda is not in my former coverage area and I have no financial interest in them. But Sinclair and I do share an alma mater.

provided vs exposed

If you're offering infrastructure as a service, you have to have infrastructure to offer and it has to be exposed.

But if you're offering something else, then:

The infrastructure doesn't need to be exposed, THUS you don't need to have it.

Examples:

• You offer VMs, so you need to expose VMs, a management console for VMs, and (hopefully) APIs to connect to and operate them
• You offer a runtime, so you may or may not have VMs--but who cares since what you need to expose is the runtime, a management console for that runtime, and (hopefully) APIs to connect to and operate it
• You offer an application, so you may or may not have VMs or a particular runtime--but who cares since what you need to expose is the application, a management console for that application, and (hopefully) APIs to connect to and operate it

It gets a little more complicated when someone wants to build something else on top of what you offer. Then they probably want and/or need more exposure to, and more control knobs for, the underlying stuff.

Basically, this is what makes IaaS (specifically VMaaS) different in kind from anything else. 

What you provide guides what you expose dictates how you can build.

What you've built limits what you can expose dictates what you can provide.

the three cloud questions you have to answer

The bit about 3 lines in "what we don't know about private cloud" seems to be making sense to everyone I discuss it with (end users, vendors, investors), so I've reformulated it as a set of questions.

Taking an application portfolio perspective.. looking across the entire set of apps you run, you have three decisions to make:

1. Of that set, what do you NOT want to develop or run, period?
2. Of the remaining set, what do you NOT want to develop or run on your own infrastructure?
3. Of the remaining set, what do you NOT want to manually provision and have manually requested?

The consensus on these questions, if one ever emerges, will produce the actual (vs pick-your-pundit's projected) terraforming of the tech landscape.

what we don't know about private cloud

This is not one market, it's a hundred (or hundreds of) markets. There is no real big pattern to where the inflection points are. There are lots of little patterns.

We do not know:

• The line between what applications we will run and what we will totally outsource to SaaS
• The lines between what we will leave bare metal, what we will virtualize and what we will actually run in any cloud
• The line between what we will do on a public cloud and in a private cloud
• The degree, magnitude, and timescale of how "virtual private cloud" and "hosted private cloud" moves those lines
• The degree, magnitude, and timescale of how various approaches to cloudifying "legacy" apps via encapsulation, migration, replicating, etc., moves those lines

These lines are being drawn in different places by everyone--including similar orgs by sector or size or whatever and also by different groups within the same org.

Add to that the range of things that are called "private cloud"--everything from "I have a data center with some servers in it" to "I've built my own EC2, EBS, S3, ELB, SQS, and SNS with open source software on commodity hardware and can automate ALL THE THINGS".

Here's something I do know: any number put forth for private cloud market size, growth, or spend is utterly daft.