Plumbing the clouds
The rise of cloud applications is growing strong enough even to force Microsoft to adapt its latest web browser, IE9, to the trend, as I wrote earlier today. Coincidentally, a separate launch yesterday addressed the same trend, but from a different direction. The vendor, Appirio, is a consulting client [see disclosure] and shared an early preview with me.
Appirio unveiled what Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer is calling a cloud service brokerage. A simpler way to look at it is that Appirio has packaged up the plumbing between cloud applications and is offering the plumbing as a service, on the same ready-to-run, pay-as-you-go terms as the applications themselves. This feels like something of a breakthrough. There’s even a nice video that talks you through the Appirio CloudWorks proposition.
