Host John Furrier had the pleasure of having Eric Pulier (Chairman & CEO) of ServiceMesh stop by theCUBE on day one of EMC World 2013 to chat about enterprise cloud, the focus of applications to ServiceMesh’s success, and the importance of software-led infrastructure (SLI) to its goals. ServiceMesh is positioned squarely in the Cloud IT Transformation corner, and can tout savings to companies anywhere from $100 million to $1 billion annually. CIO’s are jumping on board it’s unified platform approach to IT-as-a-Service.

The competitive landscape of DevOps is ripe, and Pulier sees an important factor from the market being: how do you create an automated DevOps tool chain, or infrastructure automation? People are focusing on both, but the core of it all, says Pulier, is a policy problem. Cloud infrastructure business entities want to scale quickly, with the ability to provision real-time applications. Pulier summed it up: when companies can finally, “treat code as first class.”

ServiceMesh’s road to enterprise cloud

ServiceMesh had a very unique road to the powerful, albeit unknown, leadership it has in the enterprise grade cloud management space. It was a long time coming, according to Pulier, who says ServiceMesh spent over a half of decade building an application it thought would be fundamentally important to the space. In layman’s Terms: ServiceMesh made an all-in bet that web services, now known as API’s, would be the future.

It didn’t approach that firmly-placed stake in the ground from a consumer or infrastructure perspective, it approached it from an application perspective. By on-boarding and diving really deep with highly complex multi-national companies, ServiceMesh worked the opposite way of most start-ups. A complete 180 from the typical model: funding, high-spend marketing dollars, and test cases/demonstrations. As John Furrier coined, “You went to where the puck was coming.”

A key takeaway I had from Pulier’s interview was ServiceMesh’s dedication and highlighted importance of applications to the success of the cloud and its business model. The policy-based framework addresses enterprises’ governance and security needs. Shadow IT, businesses competing with a different number of constituents, is great. But CIO’s don’t support Shadow IT, it’s not governed. Business get mandated in new markets, and external convenience and agility is now actively being moved internal.

ServiceMesh is creating a service offering where it is a cloud broker that can deliver IT as a service, in essence becoming the middle man (by removing the need for one). In creating an ecosystem of providers, the cloud flourishes. An example Pulier shared was one particular banking client it has that it was able to save in the range of $100 million to $1 billion dollars. As he described it,

“With the cloud model you have more standardization and flexibility…The only place you want human intervention is when they are going back to approve something…We replaced humans with policies (the sticky points)…Version, change, manage centrally with end-to-end provisions.”

Economics is one heck of a great proof of concept.