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This week thousands of developers from all over the world are gathering at Sun's JavaOne Conference which is happening all this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.  TONS of sessions are going all day starting at 8:30 AM through to 10:30 for some late night lab sessions.  The two big themes of the show are Cloud Computing and mobility.  I had a chance to catch up with Sam Charrington from Appistry to hear about their solutions for the enterprise sector.

Even though Cloud Computing has been all the rage in the marketing/PR world for the past 8 months the adoption rate amongst businesses and especially the enterprise is still extremely low.  They are treading lightly for a couple reasons.  One, some companies cannot host their data outside their own datacenters.  For most though they have already invested heavily in hardware and man/dev power to build, deliver, and manage applications and services across their organizations.  It takes some time to make use of those expenses and look to adopt the hot new trend in IT.  This is where Appistry comes in.

Unlike virtual machine providers like VMWare and XenSource or virtual/cloud management tools from startups like Right Scale, Eucalyptus, Zimory, Appistry delivers a couple solutions meant to ease the IT groups pain with managing many applications across many servers.

They are finding great success in the Fortune 1000 with customer like FedEx, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, as well as sattelite imaging startup Geo-Eye.  Typically large organizations have 500-1000+ servers to handle what could be 100's of applications.  Multiply that by various dev and qa machine setups and you have a massive sprawl to manage when it comes to deploying and those apps, let alone changing configurations or pushing out upgrades.

For the management side Appistry provides the Cloud IQ Manager.  This console product is a web app that is an Adobe Flex application that allows IT managers to visually manage their various apps and make sure they are deployed on the proper machines whether they be production, qa or dev.  Using a simple XML description file the user can define the logistics of their app from how it should be deployed and configured to individual compontents to be included in the deployment package.  Of course this being JavaOne, they have a large focus on the Java space with pre-existing support for popular containers/frameworks such as Tomcat, JBoss, Spring, etc.  Since they console works with the IQ Manager clients that run on the server nodes they can be physical machines, VM's, in your datacenter, on Amazons EC2, GoGrid, etc.

To entice you IT folks out there to give it a spin they provide what they call Cloud IQ Manager Community Edition which is a free download and has some limitations such as only allowing you to manage up to 5 nodes.

The console product is quite nice but doesnt have that WOW factor for me since there are so many on the market.  Having the focus on app management instead of server management like most of the other players helps set them apart as well as their other offering dubbed Cloud IQ Engine.

The IQ Engine really helps set them apart when it comes to providing a complete package for the enterprise, especially for those with strong internal dev teams.  IQ Engine acts as a distributed cache for objects and data allowing developers to run their apps across a large number of machines and crunching through some large jobs and/or a long string of smaller jobs.  The way they describe the benefits of it brings to mind what Memcache is to PHP developers to lessen round trips to the db and/or a Map Reduce system provides where you dont what to copy data back and forth across servers to process jobs on it when its more efficient to bring the job to the data.

Sam gave the example of Geo-Eye who takes the images from their sattelites for processing and tiling.  When the images are taken they are on the magnatude of TB's.  The images are then broken down into smaller tiles where several process are run on each one to prepare for uses in mapping applications.

There is lots of players trying to stake their claim in the cloud management space from open source to proprietary vendors.  Having a great initial customer list, the dual offering of IQ Manager/Engine, and working across "private" and "public" clouds should give Appistry a leg up as they prepare for growth.

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