for years, we’ve heard CIOs grouse about the fact that at least 80% of their IT budgets are locked up just “keeping the lights on.” this means that money dedicated to delivering real business innovation is limited to somewhere between 5% and 20% of their resources – simply not enough to compete in hyperactive competitive markets.
and what does “keeping the lights on” really mean, anyway? companies have spent years investing in enterprise applications like Oracle, Siebel, and Peoplesoft that yes, really do run the business. the problem is that these applications were designed and built long before clouds, containers and the concept of microservices were available. these applications were built in monolithic blocks that are nearly impossible to move to new infrastructure or storage options without lots of time and effort. and the applications are hard to upgrade since updating even one small portion means rebuilding and retesting the entire thing. managing the various versions of the discrete application modules and the resulting testing permutations can be quite challenging. it’s no wonder that enterprise applications are updated only twice a year at most.
even when you spend the money to move enterprise applications into cloud infrastructure, CIOs are wary of vendor lock-in, the notion that you’re stuck with a particular cloud vendor that may jack up their prices once your applications are trapped in their product.
changing this paradigm is hard and usually involves lots of time and money, at least until now.

meet appOrbit.

appOrbit has just come out of stealth mode to unveil its application platform that is used to holistically manage the development, testing, delivery and management of all kinds of enterprise applications, including legacy systems like the ones noted above. think of appOrbit as VMware for applications. appOrbit provides the same kind of transformation for applications that VMware provided for infrastructure.
appOrbit can be used to modernize legacy applications, but it’s also useful for developing net new cloud-native applications and dramatically accelerating test-dev environments as well.
using the appOrbit platform buys enterprise IT organizations quite a bit.

• complete portability, without code change. enterprise applications can be abstracted and separated from any dependency on underlying infrastructure, including sources of data. it’s now possible to move applications to different infrastructure combinations, without changing a single line of code. with complete portability between cloud environments, container tools and servers, IT organizations can break vendor lock-in and gain the flexibility required to move their applications to cloud vendors that offer the best combination of price, performance, reliability and features.
• accelerated release cycles. with appOrbit, enterprise applications can be blueprinted, abstracted into smaller, portable components and stored in a virtualized catalog in minutes. the components can then be cloned, reassembled and deployed with a few clicks using a very slick user interface. this saves a ton of time for development and testing teams that up to now have spent weeks simply trying to recreate production applications and production data for upgrade and QA. using appOrbit speeds up release cycles and when release cycles accelerate, so does the opportunity to innovate.
• seamless upgrades. when you adopt the appOrbit approach to portable components, you can actually update production applications on the fly, without taking them down. this means you can continue to run the business without interruption and with very low risk of an embarrassing outage.
• data and security included. the appOrbit platform doesn’t just make code portable, it takes care of data and security as well. enterprise applications can now run on any infrastructure, but leverage any data storage options as well. IT organizations can then take advantage of the latest and best storage options without changing a single line of code in the application. application-level security policies can also be automatically included and deployed, reducing risk and ensuring consistent security coverage.
• DevOps friendly. appOrbit, breaks apart monolithic enterprise applications into smaller components that can then act as independent services. this gives IT organizations the flexibility to upgrade and automatically deploy individual components through standard DevOps processes and orchestration tools.
the appOrbit team has come up with something truly unique. the real winners here will be enterprises that want to move 10X faster and convert “keep the lights on” budget into innovation budget. appOrbit has done the smart thing by quietly proving its technology with more than 24 customers including Ericsson, Prospect Medical and Infosys before launching the company this week. i’m excited to see the next chapter of the company unfold.
enterprise applications just met the 21st century!