The drive to modernize applications and transform organizations into modern digital businesses has been a bumpy one for many companies. CloudFabrix Software Inc. plans to smooth the path, however, with its AppDimensions solution.

Introduced today at Cisco Live 2016 Berlin, AppDimensions is the industry’s first Governance Platform as a Services (GPaaS). It was designed to modernize and govern applications, operations and processes.

AppDimensions “allows enterprises to holistically transform and govern many transforming entities to meet business outcomes in a consistent, quantifiable, policy-driven and automated manner,” said Bhaskar Krishnamsetty, Chief Product Officer of CloudFabrix.

A key feature is that platform allows companies to constantly evaluate their new and existing applications and determine the best environment (public cloud or private cloud) in which to migrate and operate their applications.

Specifically, Krishnamsetty said the tool offers these four benefits:

1. Legacy Core Application Transformation: AppDimensions helps enterprises specify and introduce governance in order to transform applications in a controlled manner. It does so by measuring the readiness of each dimension and recommending corrective actions.

2. Cloud-Native Application Development: The platform provides many built-in capabilities for bringing together leading technologies such as microservices, containers and DevOps automation to help enterprises effectively develop and govern cloud-native applications.

3. Application Portfolio Analysis: AppDimensions performs continuous deep discovery of applications and analyzes large amounts of runtime and operations data to produce insights and recommendations.

4. Multi-Cloud Enablement/Choice: Enterprises can maintain a centralized approach to defining and enforcing application policies while at the same time leverage the cost benefits, capacity and speed of provisioning of the external cloud. With this feature, companies can access their infrastructure resources from public, local and private clouds as if they were one cloud.

For companies that want to modernize their business but don’t have the resources or internal staffing to do so, AppDimensions fills a need, said Brian Gracely, lead cloud analyst at Wikibon.

“The CloudFabrix AppDimensions platform is positioned to both help customers migrate existing applications to a hybrid cloud, as well as provide real-time governance to rapidly changing cloud native applications,” he said. “It provides a platform that will help enterprise companies transition from today’s applications to a digital business.”

Going beyond static systems

CloudFabrix launched in 2015 and is led by a team of engineers who previously helmed Cloupia, which Cisco acquired in 2012. With AppDimensions, the company has gone further than traditional Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) companies, which are focused on static systems.

“The AppDimensions platform is focused on environments that not only will use multiple cloud platforms, but also support modern applications that are changing rapidly,” Gracely said.

In addition, providing AppDimensions as a Software as a Service makes it easier for companies to adopt, he said.

“By using big data analytics within the system, the platform is able to provide real-time updates to applications and operations teams regardless of which cloud platform the application run on,” Gracely said.

This is a platform that drives outcomes and helps companies modernize their applications quickly with little disruption, said Raju Penmetsa, CTO of CloudFabrix.

“Everybody wants to be as agile and nimble as Amazon and Netflix, but most enterprises are stuck with legacy applications. They don’t know how to operate in a modern world—how to govern applications. They’re looking at platforms to help them modernize,” he said. “This is what we’re bridging—what we’re providing with our platform.”

AppDimensions is currently in alpha trials with customers and partners. It will move into beta in March and become generally available during the summer.

Image by via Gerd Altmann via pixabay