In the News
AppZero, a startup that produces server-side virtual machine translation products, has introduced a product that it says delivers the "grease" necessary to facilitate enterprise application portability in cloud environments.
Today, the company announced the general availability of AppZero 4.0 for Windows. AppZero decouples server-side applications from Windows, packaging, running and maintaining them as virtual application appliances (VAA) that can be swapped among cloud environments, including Amazon EC2 and GoGrid. They can then provisioned as services.
"Moving existing applications onto the cloud is an impediment to adoption. We are one of the few tools that does that," said Greg O'Connor, president and CEO of AppZero. "Our layer is between the operating system and applications."
The VAAs are pre-installed, preconfigured applications that do not contain any elements of Windows, enabling application portability without violating Windows license agreements, he explained. "The OS does not change. Customers can use a good OS as a base layer and slap the VAA on top of a good image."
AppZero permits enterprises to experiment with the cloud more easily for purposes such as disaster recovery and servicing spiking workflows, or even partition applications among clouds using a cloud management platform such as RightScale, said O'Connor. "Server-side application virtualization makes portability or mobility of where apps can run really easy."
That quality makes AppZero a likely acquisition target, said Rachel Chalmers, research director at the 451 Group. "They are not a hosting provider per se, but a great technology to bridge hosting providers with their enterprise customers."
