CliQr Technologies Releases CliQr CloudCenter, Opening Up the Cloud for Enterprise Applications

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 26, 2012) - CliQr Technologies, the company that enables applications to fluidly move to and between clouds, today announced the launch of CloudCenter, a unique and powerful cloud application management platform that enables businesses to quickly and securely deploy, manage and optimize the performance of existing applications on any private, public or hybrid cloud without migration disruption and expense.

"Due to the increasing size and variability of application workloads, businesses around the world have been attracted to the elasticity and resources on-demand that the cloud computing has to offer," said Gaurav Manglik, co-founder and CEO of CliQr Technologies. "To-date however, many businesses have found these promises too good to be true. Migrating their existing applications has been costly and complex, often involving cloud-specific re-coding, virtualization and, once on the cloud, sub-optimal performance. CliQr's CloudCenter changes all of that. CliQr makes cloud computing a reality for businesses, enabling them to efficiently on-board any existing application onto and between any clouds. CliQr sets the stage for mainstream cloud adoption."

While most existing enterprise applications are built to scale, the rigid datacenter infrastructures they run on are not. The outcome of this mismatch is that applications either experience poor performance due to resource constraints or IT staffs have to over-build their datacenters to accommodate peak workloads. According to Gartner, there were almost 10 million servers purchased in 2011 and it is not uncommon that 75-85% of the datacenter servers are purchased for peak-load periods only. This is terribly inefficient and causes companies to waste billions of dollars each year. Seeming to the rescue the cloud. With its elasticity and ability to provide resources on-demand, the cloud has provided hope for businesses hoping to get off the IT infrastructure treadmill.

While the promise of cloud computing is real, most cloud progress to-date has been around creating cloud infrastructure, developing new cloud applications or providing packaged apps as a service on a cloud (SaaS); all of these designed to run on a dedicated cloud provider. While important milestones, businesses have invested in and today use millions of line-of business applications and relative few have been able to find their way to the cloud due to significant barriers involving migration disruption, expense and unknown performance. Once completed, companies need to repeat these tasks and experience these risks all over again in order to move an application to another cloud in the future.

"We recognized early on that cloud computing could never be fully exploited as long as getting to the cloud continued to be a infrastructure-centric, professional services-heavy process," said Tenry Fu, co-Founder and CTO of CliQr Technologies. "We designed CloudCenter to be an extremely approachable platform that looks at the task of cloud computing from an application's perspective, simplifying on-boarding without modification and image management, optimizing performance and providing end-to-end cloud security for any business application on any one or combination of private, public or hybrid clouds. Beyond the simple notion of multi-cloud, CloudCenter abstracts away application dependencies from cloud specific APIs and images, delivering true and fluid portability between clouds without any additional migration effort."

CliQr's CloudCenter - Making Clouds Available to Business Applications

CliQr's CloudCenter is the first cloud-application management platform. CloudCenter enables any application to get to and fluidly move between clouds with optimal price-performance and without migration disruption and expense. CloudCenter is composed of two primary components:

• CloudCenter Orchestrator
• CloudCenter Manager

CloudCenter Orchestrator - Any App, Any Cloud

The CloudCenter Orchestrator environment is advanced technology that enables different applications to work with different clouds without either having to be modified for each other. A hybrid App/Cloud abstraction layer, the Orchestrator environment is made-up of three components; the App Orchestrator Templates, the Cloud Orchestrator and cloud-specific CloudBlades™.

• App Orchestrator Templates. As an off-the-shelf template for each application architecture type, the App Orchestrator template collection is common to and resides on all supported clouds. The templates enable a cloud's rules and behaviors for compute, storage, network and security to work optimally with those of the application. The templates optimize the way an application uses available cloud resources often leading to a price-performance enhancement of 5-10x compared to other migration tools or approaches. Templates provided today include Hadoop, High-Volume Batch, Parallel Computing, Web-Apps (beta), Cluster Computing and Multi-step Workflows.
  
  
• Cloud Orchestrator. Common and residing on each supported cloud with the App Orchestrator. The Cloud Orchestrator enables an application's rules and behaviors around compute, storage, network and security to work optimally with the cloud without modification of the application.
  
  
• CloudBlades. CloudBlades are packaged software modules that reside on each cloud and "snap" into the Cloud Orchestrator. CloudBlades are unique, cloud-specific best-practice implementations of a cloud's rules and behaviors around compute, storage, network and security. Public CloudBlades currently available include Amazon, HP and Rackspace and private cloud support includes Openstack and VMware. A CloudBlade SDK enables rapid CloudBlade support for additional private or public clouds.
  

CloudCenter Manager - Simple Management for the Lifecycle of an App on Clouds

The CloudCenter Manager application suite is an intuitive dashboard that IT end-users interact with to manage every aspect of moving, managing, optimizing and securing their applications on clouds. The CloudCenter Management Services resides on CliQr's cloud and includes:

• Application Lifecycle Management - Enables businesses and independent software providers to on-board, test, run and switch between clouds with just a click.
  
  
• Policy Management - User defined policies enabling condition and threshold based alerts and automates the provisioning and scaling of cloud resources within a cloud and/or bursting to other clouds.
  
  
• Storage Management - Allows users to create shared, secure and persistent cloud storage and policies that can be set for syncing data between on-premise and cloud storages along with between clouds.
  
  
• Cloud-App Benchmark Management - Provides continuous price-performance and availability benchmarking between a specific application and its desired performance characteristics across various cloud configurations and different cloud providers.
  
  
• Cloud Accounts - Enables management of multiple cloud accounts and setting rules around both default clouds and cloud-bursting.
  
  
• License Management - Allows ISVs to create, manage and enforce licensing and support of hybrid pricing models of their CliQr deployed cloud-applications.
  
  
• Security - Provides a complete layer of cloud security. Data and applications are only visible to the end-user. End-to-end security includes data encryption in motion and at rest, secure key management and a secure private cloud service proxy.
  

Availability
The CliQr CloudCenter solution is now available. Please check out the CliQr demo video here.

About CliQr Technologies
CliQr Technologies™ is a leading provider of cloud-application management solutions. CliQr simplifies the process of on-boarding, testing and securely running applications on the cloud so that today's businesses can take full advantage of the real power and elasticity that cloud computing offers. CliQr's CloudCenter™ solution delivers complete visibility and control over a company's cloud environment, enabling the continuous optimization of both runtime and price performance of any application on one or among many clouds.

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, CliQr Technologies is privately held and backed by leading venture capital companies, including Google Ventures and Foundation Capital. To learn more, please visit http://www.cliqrtech.com.

CliQr Technologies, CliQr CloudCenter and CloudBlades, are trademarks of CliQr Technologies, Inc. All other registered or unregistered trademarks are the sole property of their respective owners.