Last week Cisco announced its intent to acquire CliQr, an application-defined cloud orchestration platform to model, deploy and manage applications across bare metal, virtualized and container environments. News spread across the cloud world as you would expect highlighting the further consolidation of the cloud market. One opinion caught our attention.
David Linthicum published on InfoWorld his opinion that the purchase is bad news for enterprises. The planned acquisition he suggests isn’t great for IT shops pursuing a multi-cloud strategy. That tools like CliQr’s “are important important for enterprise admins to deploy and manage applications across the gamut of bare-metal, virtualized, and container-based environments. Such tools are particularly important when you use multiple cloud providers, as most enterprises should.”
His opinion is that CliQr will move into the InterCloud framework and while it makes sense for Cisco, it doesn’t for IT. David says:
“To be effective, cloud-management platforms need to be both technology- and cloud-agnostic. That independence ends once these platforms are purchased by large enterprise vendors that focus on their own cloud offerings, in a bid to steer customers to their offerings.”
The value is up the stack
This is where our view is different. CliQr’s focus wasn’t necessarily on delivering multi-cloud functionality. Instead, it was on adding value on top of its existing cloud solution. Many companies similar to CliQr ask themselves how to do that? IaaS is a given, so developing a unique solution becomes about the value you deliver on top of IaaS. CliQr chose to focus on app orchestration. Similar to Flexiant Concerto, once the solution was ready, there was the benefit that because it was developed above the stack, the solution was/is available across all clouds. The result? The cloud doesn’t matter because the solution is something above it.
Cisco didn’t really purchase a multi-cloud solution so that it would require companies to purchase multi-cloud from them (of course, they will sell it). Instead, they purchased the added functionality available on top of the cloud.
The cloud industry as a whole is moving up the stack and this purchase demonstrates that. Innovation is higher up the stack and multi-cloud is a benefit of this. Customers have freedom to choose their cloud so they can focus instead on the app.
Flexiant Concerto is offering similar benefits to DevOps – it lets them focus on the app – while abstracting it from the infrastructure. Try Flexiant Concerto to see the benefit it can provide up the stack.
