Dan's Take

The IndependenceIT Cloud Management Platform

An intriguing player in the cloud management space.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 07/22/2016

IndependenceIT CEO Seth Bostock and CTO Charles Buck came by to discuss the company's cloud management platform CMP+, where it fits in the industry and its target audience.

In IndependenceIT's view, many of today's cloud management platforms focus largely on managing infrastructure, hypervisors and virtual machines (VMs), but don't really understand how those elements are deployed in a cloud computing environment. While these tools do focus on enabling virtual environments, they're complex, expensive and often require a large investment in infrastructure. Although many enterprises have to live in multi-tenant computing environments, the tools focus on single-tenant environments.

Platform Agnostic
IndependenceIT wanted to build a computing environment that would work well regardless of whether the cloud framework was Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, OpenStack, VMware vCloud, or custom environments built on Microsoft's Hyper-V, Citrix's XenServer or some other VM software platform.

CMP+ offers tools to support managing and provisioning users, applications, and infrastructure with an eye toward making implementation of software-defined computing environments easy to do and highly automated. Another goal is to make it simple to define and manage complex workflows.

CMP+ provides a two tier API structure: one tier allows control of the local software-defined datacenter. The other provides global control of a multi-note, multi-site infrastructure. The product includes management of a software-defined network infrastructure and a global service broker function.

In the company's words, CMP+ is "a workspace automation software platform that allows IT departments, service providers and ISVs to easily deliver workspaces, applications and data from any cloud infrastructure to users anywhere, on any device." Since cloud management and delivery platforms represent such a competitive marketplace right now, I wondered at first if the company was falling into the trap of trying to be everything to everyone, everywhere, always.

Dan's Take: A Specific Focus
After speaking with Bostock and Buck, it's clear that they have a strong focus primarily on cloud service providers serving enterprises, and those enterprises themselves that want to implement hybrid cloud environments that support some, but clearly not all, of its business applications. They're concentrating on Windows-centric workloads, although their technology can be used to provision, monitor, orchestrate and manage both on- and off-premise cloud computing environments.

They're not focused on enterprises that use the LAMP stack as their primary application development and delivery platform, although CMP+ can certainly monitor and orchestrate workloads living there.