Cloud Ecosystem Map, Release 2.0 Notes

By Nitin Jain and Mark Koenig

This week, Appirio introduced the next generation of our interactive Cloud Ecosystem Map. This post is intended to explain how to use the map, as well as how we used Force.com to integrate the Ecosystem Map into our computing environment. For more information on why we felt it was time for an update to the map, please visit our CIO Blog here.

We've retained the by-now-familiar three-by-three sorting of the ecosystem, as we have heard from our customers and readers that it is an easily accessible mechanism for understanding the dimensions of the cloud. At the same time, we’ve also made more explicit groupings of those vendors who we consider to be “major players,” as well as other players who are contributing to the richness of the cloud ecosystem.


These categorizations are shown in the graphic above:

• The primary sort is by type of solution. The public cloud group is reserved for solutions that are multi-tenant, single instance. The next group is reserved for vendor hosted solutions that are either single-tenant or multi-instance - a different architecture than what's behind the public cloud. The third and final grouping is reserved for what's being called the "private cloud"- any technology that brings some of the benefits of the private cloud into your on-premise data center.
• The secondary sorting is by layer of the technology stack, in keeping with the emerging consensus around the 3 major layers of the cloud: applications (SaaS), application platforms (PaaS), and infrastructure (IaaS).
• The tertiary sort separates out those vendors with multiple offerings in a section of the cloud, as compared with those who are specializing in a particular category within a particular layer.

How To Use the Map

Landing Page: When you start at the front page, you will see an overview of the cloud ecosystem. It will provide a glimpse of one of the segments of the cloud ecosystem map, A cloud segment is defined as combination of the cloud type and service layer. For example, the Public Cloud - Applications segment defines applications (SaaS) in the public cloud.

Interactive Map: Click on the cloud ecosystem preview image on the landing page to drill down to interactive cloud ecosystem map.

• You will start with the Public Cloud - Applications - Major players tab. This tab contains the vendors we believe have the greatest influence on the public cloud, based primarily on number of offerings and market penetration. The Other Players tab contains either the smaller or the more point-solution focused providers. That's a guideline, not a rule -- appearance in the other players tab does not necessarily denote lack of power or size!
• You can jump directly to any cloud segment by clicking on the top row of tabs (cloud types) or second row of tabs to navigate across different service categories like Applications, Platforms and Infrastructure. Should you wish to go,to the main page, simply click the back button on your browser.
• For some of the data you will find click-able links. These links will take you directly to the service provider’s website (or in some cases to a specific page describing the offering from the vendor). Thus far, this data has been added mostly to the vertically-integrated Major Players in the Public Cloud. We'll be adding more of these links over time.
• Over time, we anticipate adding more features, such as search by offering or provider name.

How We Used Force.com to Build the Map

One of our goals in refreshing the cloud ecosystem map was to move from a presentation based on Adobe Flash, which gave us tremendous interactivity, but was relatively static when it came time to change the underlying data. Going forward, we wanted something that would preserve the interactivity, but that would be more dynamic and database-driven, and that we could maintain ourselves. For these reasons, the current version of the ecosystem map is built on the Force.com platform and feeds information into an interactive web page.

Here’s how we did it...

Force.com uses a Model-View-Controller design paradigm for building custom applications.

Robust and Extensible data model: Force.com provides a robust and easy to build data model. Using just point-and-click we built a data model to store offering, cloud segment and vendor information and create relationships among them. Here is the Entity relationship diagram for the Cloud Ecosystem.

Force.com View and Controller: The Force.com platform also provides a simple way to develop a user interface. The UI uses Visuaforce pages and a built-in controller based on standard and custom objects (or you can write a custom controller from scratch). For the Ecosystem Map, we quickly put together an interactive UI based on ExtJS framework and wrote our own custom controller to get the data from custom objects and pass it to the Visualforce page as a JSON array. The ExtJS framework took the JSON data to create a data store and fed it into the data grids.

Now that we have it in our environment, we’ve realized that there are other ways we can use the data to improve the performance of our sales and delivery teams. We’ll be working on building out those capabilities next, and we’ll keep you up-to-date on our progress.

We’d like to thank the following Appirians who contributed their efforts to helping us with the refresh of the ecosystem map: Lori Asburry, Kirk Crenshaw, Eric Czerner, Nirav Doctor, Balakrishna Narasimhan, Bipin Nepani, Ryan Nichols, Huy Nguyen, Yamini Rangan, Michelle Swan, Jennifer Taylor, Mark Tognetti.



Thanks!
Nitin, Mark and the entire Appirio team.

Cloud Ecosystem Map - Release Notes

By Troy Angrignon

Today, Appirio launched an interactive cloud ecosystem map on appirio.com/ecosystem, using the map I produced in March as a base, and building on it based on Appirio's experience helping move thousands of companies to the cloud. This post is intended to explain this new release of the cloud ecosystem map and how to use it.

What's on the map:
It sometimes seems as though EVERYTHING is being described as "cloud": SaaS apps, hosted apps, hosting companies... even on-premise virtualization platforms - all are described as "cloud" by some vendors. No wonder there's market confusion. We wanted to sort through the hundreds of offerings being described as "cloud" and put them into some sort of taxonomy so that customers could make sense of this rapidly expanding marketplace.

We've done 2 types of sorting:

• The first sorting is vertically, by layer of the technology stack. There seems to be emerging consensus around the 3 major layers of the cloud: applications, application platforms, and infrastructure. Within each of these layers, however, are dozens of different types of solutions. Most are not true "layers" of technology, but we made a rough attempt to sort them by their level of abstraction in order to make clear what's running on what.

• The second sorting is horizontally, by type of solution. The underlying architecture of a solution matters, because it drives the economics available to the customer. Our first column is reserved for solutions that are multi-tenant, single instance-- what we'll call true public cloud. The second column is reserved for vendor hosted solutions that are either single-tenant or multi-instance-- a different architecture than what's behind the public cloud. The third column is reserved for what's being called the "private cloud"-- any technology that brings some of the benefits of the private cloud into your on-premise data center.
 

How to use the map:

Macro view:When you start at the front page, you will see a 3 x 3 box, defined by the dimensions above. From this view, you can see the overall landscape of apps, platforms, and infrastructure of all three types: public, hosted, and private. You can also see the major players here and glance at their lines to see where they play overall. For example, you'll note that Salesforce provides things at all three layers but that some of that functionality is directly accessible to the user (black lines) and some is not (denoted with grey lines). Depending on whether you are focusing on higher levels of abstraction and business value and less on hands-on IT, you will consider that a benefit or a curse.

Zoomed View: To dig deeper, click any of the 9 sub-boxes in order to enter that box.

• Once inside a given box, there are two pages (left and right) that will give you the full view of all data. The first page contains the largest or most vertically integrated players in the category. The second page contains either the smaller or the more point-solution focused providers. That's a guideline, not a rule-- appearance in the right hand page does not denote lack of power or size!
• You will also find a miniature nine-box navigation icon in the upper left corner. You can use that to jump directly from any section to any other section by clicking on the appropriate square in that navigation icon. Should you wish to go to the main page, simply click on our logo or on "Home."
• For some of the data you will find clickable links. This data has been mostly added to the vertically integrated major players in Column 1: Public Cloud / Multi-tenant. We'll be adding more of these links over time.
• You will also see green dots throughout the document. Those are connection points horizontally across the landscape. It means that there is a partnership connection or that that offering connects within a column or between major columns. A great example is the Finance row where Salesforce.com has deep integrations with external partners. There are many of those cross-column, cross-cloud, and public/private bridging mechanisms. We believe there will be a lot of innovation in this area and we sometimes refer to them as "bridging" technologies.

How to contribute:
Please note that this is very much a work-in-progress. It is not and was not intended to be 100% comprehensive. It is intended to be a "very good sketch", not a super high resolution photo of the landscape. Our goal is really to note the 20% that covers 80% of the cases, particularly in the platform and infrastructure layers. The Saas marketplace has been covered very well already by the likes of Jeff Kaplan's SaaS Showplace. Having said that, feel free to send us submissions for consideration in future updates as it is intended to be a dynamic, living, breathing work.

Please explore the document and give us your feedback, thoughts, ideas, and company suggestions by clicking on the "feedback" link on the map or emailing us at cloud@appirio.com.

We'd like to give a nod to those who have already contributed their valuable time and energy to this project: This map began a year ago and at the time it was heavily built upon the work of the following amazing people: Peter Laird, Kent Dixon, Christofer Hoff, Opencrowd.com, Michael Sheehan, Sam Charrington, Robert W. Anderson, Matias Wiloski, John M. Willis, James Urquhart, David Berlind, Randy Bias, and Jean-Lou Dupont. I then expanded it through the involvement and sponsorship of Dealmaker Media and the Under the Radar Clarity in the Cloud program and it was published kindly by Sandhill.com. Recently I have been lucky enough to work with some of the top thinkers in cloud today - my colleagues here at Appirio - many of whom I got to research, white-board, argue, debate, and create with. During this time we pushed ourselves to re-evaluate the nine-box approach and the overall taxonomic structure to make sure it stood up to review. I'm convinced that because of this work, this version of the map is the best yet. Now we are sharing it out, in the hopes that you will come and help make it even better. We hope that this piece of work will contribute in some small way as a tool to help people understand the complexities of public cloud, hosted services, and private clouds and the interplay between them all.

Thanks!
Troy and the entire Appirio team.