Guys (and girl): here’s your wakeup call: you’ve done it. Your mission is completed. Victory is yours, Agile is the new normal. So let’s focus just a bit more on actually delivering agile projects, rather than writing about how to do them, shall we?

At ServiceMesh, we agree. We think so highly of Agile principles that we even went so far as to name our product the Agility Platform.

While I loved Ron’s post, I think there is something that went uncaptured. While it’s great that we no longer question Agile principles and that we’re applying Agile methodologies in multiple domains within our organizations, the true win is going to be the “emergent agility” that is going to come as multiple Agile domains start to interact with each other. For instance, while agile development and devops are cool by themselves, if you can arrange them organizationally such that one feeds seamlessly into another, you’ll take yourself to a higher level altogether.

Years ago, the financial services world started building a model they called “straight-through processing” (STP), eliminating all the paperwork such that financial transactions could be processed completely by machine, without human intervention. It revolutionized the trading world and allowed transaction prices to drop dramatically. You wouldn’t get $7 trades at your discount broker without straight through processing, for instance. Now, the only time humans get involved with financial transactions is to process the exception cases, when something goes wrong (e.g., trade information between counter-parties doesn’t match, for instance). Organizing things this way is difficult, but the benefits are profound.

In the IT world, Agile principles are the building blocks for “straight-through IT processing,” the primitive elements that will be strung together to take us to a new level of application delivery agility, efficiency, and cost reduction. Ron’s right — Agile is the new normal. Now let’s kick it up a notch.

(See also: Shift Your Cloud to the Fast Path)

I’ve been saying for some time that virtualization and cloud computing are not mandatory partners. Certainly, virtualization is a tool that makes creating and managing cloud computing services easy. However, more and more, as organizations move to cloud computing, they’re asking for the omission of that virtualization layer for better performance and control. Cloud providers are now agreeing to those demands.

Like David, I have been saying the same thing for quite a while. See “Cloud Myth #5: Clouds Require Virtualization” and “Internal Cloud vs. Virtualization: What’s the Diff?” for instance.

The fact is, because IT people understand how something works, we often get distracted by the implementation and forget that all the outside world sees is the external service definition. From the point of view of a cloud user, IaaS simply allows me to start an operating system instance and gives me root access into it, while defining some parameters about the performance I should expect to receive. Whether that instance is running in a hypervisor or on the metal is irrelevant (though it is very relevant to the cloud operations team that has to manage the offering). Cloud implementors need to spend more time thinking about abstracting the external service definition away from the implementation details, allowing the implementation technology to evolve as required. If you create a leaky abstraction that cannot evolve over time, you’re inevitably going to find that your choices will need to change and you’ll break the service definition when that happens.

Leading Analyst Firm Names ServiceMesh a Cool Vendor in Asia Pacific and in Key Insight for Investors

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – May 8, 2012 – ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading enterprise-class cloud application management platform for Global 2000 companies, today announced it has been named a 2012 Gartner Cool Vendor in two additional Gartner reports. The first, published May 1, 2012, is Cool Vendors in Asia/Pacific 2012, which covers innovative solutions across a variety of industries and disciplines in the Asia/Pacific region. The second report, published May 1, 2012, is Cool Vendors: Key Insight for Investors 2012, which recognizes emerging vendors that are bringing potentially disruptive innovations to market. The reports come on the heels of ServiceMesh being named earlier this year in Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Cloud Management 2012 report.

Cool Vendors in Asia/Pacific 2012 notes that CIOs and other IT executives looking to deliver cloud-based, on-demand services that require extensive, yet flexible governance controls may be interested in ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform. It also states that ServiceMesh’s cloud management platform enables IT organizations to manage the plan, build and run cycle of cloud resources leveraging a sophisticated, policy-based framework. Cool Vendors: Key Insight for Investors 2012, a report available to Gartner’s investor clientele, provides an insider’s look at select companies and explains why investors should give added attention to each one, including a discussion of their impact on the sector’s investment thesis.

“We believe the inclusion of ServiceMesh in these additional Gartner Cool Vendor reports demonstrates the impact that our Agility Platform is having on the IT industry as we continue to grow our sales and marketing efforts internationally,” said Steve Henning, vice president of marketing at ServiceMesh. “More CIOs are recognizing that new cloud-based IT operating models can provide their organizations with strategic and operational competitive advantages, and ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform continues to be identified as a key enabler for enterprises embarking on their Cloud IT transformation journey.”

Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform.

Request a demonstration of the Agility Platform in action.

View short videos of the Agility Platform capabilities.

Join Agile IT operating model conversations on the ServiceMesh blog.

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s only enterprise cloud application management platform that enables transformative “everything as a service” IT delivery models for Global 2000 clients. Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and to enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

PR Contact:

Elyce Ventura
Eastwick
408-470-4870
servicemesh@eastwick.com

WHAT: ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading cloud application management platform for Global 2000 companies, today announced that Dave Roberts, ServiceMesh’s senior vice president of business development & platform ecosystem, and Anthony Skipper, ServiceMesh’s vice president of security and integration, will present a range of enterprise cloud adoption best practices at this year’s Interop Las Vegas, May 6-10, at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas.

During the Enterprise Cloud Summit – Cloud Platforms track, Dave Roberts will present “Free-Market Cloud Computing: Avoiding Stalinist Failures in Your Cloud Operating Model.” Dave Roberts will also participate on a panel discussion, “The Great Debate: Companies That Don’t Embrace Big Data are Doomed.” Anthony Skipper will present “Avoiding the Dark Side of the Cloud – Real World Implementation Lessons.”

WHY: Cloud-enabled IT transformation is a strategic opportunity to change current enterprise IT operating models to become more agile and cost effective while enabling greater business innovation and speed to market.  However many enterprises that are pursuing cloud computing initiatives today fail to grasp the broader impact that governance, lifecycle management, and organizational change have on the ultimate success and business value of those cloud initiatives. Therefore, it’s critical for cloud advocates and project owners within the enterprise to understand how to avoid or overcome the governance, security, and operational hurdles they may face as they pursue their enterprise cloud strategy.

WHEN:

Sunday, May 6, 2012, 2:15-2:35 p.m., South Seas D
“Free-Market Cloud Computing: Avoiding Stalinist Failures in Your Cloud Operating Model”
Dave Roberts, Senior Vice President of Business Development & Platform Ecosystem, ServiceMesh

Tuesday, May 8, 2012, 3:45-4:45 p.m., Lagoon B
“The Great Debate: Companies That Don’t Embrace Big Data are Doomed”
Dave Roberts, Senior Vice President of Business Development & Platform Ecosystem, ServiceMesh

Wednesday, May 9, 2012, 2:00-3:00 p.m., Lagoon B
“Avoiding the Dark Side of the Cloud – Real World Implementation Lessons”
Anthony Skipper, Vice President of Security & Integration, ServiceMesh

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s only enterprise cloud application management platform that enables transformative “everything as a service” IT delivery models for Global 2000 clients. Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and to enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

Contact:
Elyce Ventura
Eastwick Communications
408-470-4870

servicemesh@eastwick.com

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – April 18, 2012 – ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading enterprise-class cloud application management platform for Global 2000 companies, today announced it has been named a 2012 Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Management. Published April 11, 2012, the Gartner, Inc. survey of global CIOs identified cloud computing as one of the top-three strategic technology investments and recommended that IT executives take advantage of cloud computing innovations in self-service provisioning, software tool chain automation, and policy-driven governance to improve the agility and efficiency of their infrastructures, platforms, and applications. ServiceMesh’s cloud management platform enables enterprise IT organizations to maximize the strategic competitive advantage of these investments by managing the plan, build and run lifecycle of cloud resources leveraging a sophisticated, policy-based framework.

Tweet this: @ServiceMesh named 2012 #coolvendor in #Cloud Management by @gartner_inc. http://bit.ly/JA6WIC

“Being named a Gartner Cool Vendor supports our belief that ServiceMesh is offering the right solution at the right time,” said Steve Henning, vice president of marketing at ServiceMesh. “The survey of CIOs indicates that enterprises are increasingly implementing private clouds with plans to leverage hybrid cloud strategies in the future. The flexible, scalable, policy-driven ServiceMesh Agility Platform automates hybrid cloud deployment and management, and supports the entire software development lifecycle for cloud applications, making self-service IT a reality for large enterprises.”

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform has helped Global 2000 enterprises unlock the business value of cloud computing by governing, managing and securing enterprise-grade portfolios of platforms and applications across hybrid clouds. The enterprise-ready, application-focused cloud management platform automates the deployment and real-time management of cloud-based applications and services. ServiceMesh is the only solution that governs and manages across the entire software development lifecycle and accelerates DevOps initiatives for companies deploying and managing enterprise applications in the cloud.

Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform.

Request a demonstration of the Agility Platform in action.

View short videos of the Agility Platform capabilities.

Join Agile IT operating model conversations on the ServiceMesh blog.

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s only enterprise cloud application management platform that enables transformative “everything as a service” IT delivery models for Global 2000 clients. Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and to enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

About Gartner’s Cool Vendors Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – April 11, 2012 – ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading, enterprise-class cloud application management platform, today announced support for VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service and the vFabric cloud application platform within the ServiceMesh Agility Platform. With the integrated solution, customers can deploy, manage and scale Cloud Foundry instances and complex vFabric application topologies in hybrid cloud environments in just minutes while maintaining security, compliance and governance through flexible policy definition and enforcement. The ServiceMesh Agility Platform orchestrates the entire software development lifecycle, automating workflow across existing development tool chains, to enable better coordination between development and operations teams and speed time to market for new business applications and services.

“ServiceMesh’s support for Cloud Foundry and vFabric promises to accelerate customer development of cloud applications,” said Jerry Chen, vice president of cloud and application services at VMware. “Their policy-based cloud application management platform augments rapid time to market while addressing enterprise security, compliance and governance expectations. We look forward to working with ServiceMesh as they accelerate enterprise adoption of Cloud Foundry and vFabric.”

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform has helped Global 2000 enterprises unlock the business value of cloud computing by governing, managing and securing applications across hybrid clouds. With today’s announcement, the Agility Platform brings more choices to progressive companies that want to transform their IT operating models to deliver significant cost and time to market advantages. With the ServiceMesh Agility Platform, companies developing and deploying vFabric and Cloud Foundry applications can:

• Increase speed and frequency of software releases
• Automate workflow across existing development tool chains, including comprehensive release management
• Govern and enforce common application platforms across the entire software development lifecycle to ensure smooth production deployment
• Adhere to stringent security and regulatory requirements
• Significantly lower TCO by leveraging hybrid clouds
• Provide cloud portability for complex application topologies
• Instantiate and manage policies for multiple development and test environments in a single Cloud Foundry instance, providing a true enterprise PaaS environment

“To gain the most value from cloud computing, enterprises must empower their development and operations teams to better collaborate to deliver applications and services faster, without sacrificing quality,” said Steve Henning, vice president of marketing at ServiceMesh. “By leveraging hybrid cloud environments, including vCloud Director clouds, and providing policy-driven orchestration of the entire software development lifecycle for Cloud Foundry and vFabric applications, ServiceMesh and VMware help speed the adoption of DevOps methodologies. With the joint solution, development and operations teams break down the silos and deliver applications and services faster, while maintaining the governance, compliance and security essential in the enterprise.”

Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform.

Request a demonstration of the Agility Platform in action.

View short videos of the Agility Platform capabilities.

Join Agile IT operating model conversations on the ServiceMesh blog.

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s only enterprise-class cloud application management platform that enables transformative “everything as a service” IT delivery models for Global 2000 clients. Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and to enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives. To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

It’s increasingly obvious that “self-service” and “governance” are two yin yang complements in the world of cloud computing. These forces come together to deliver “agility with control.” At ServiceMesh, we have coined the phrase, “Go fast; stay safe,” to describe this effect.

The benefits of self-service are fairly obvious. By allowing individual users to directly access the IT resources that are most interesting to them through a self-service interface, IT resources become more responsive to business needs. Users can deploy the right resources, at the right time, for maximum business effect. As a consequence, business agility improves and, on balance, favorable business outcomes ensue. But uncontrolled access to self-service resources would also result in chaos — wasted resources, broken laws, and bad business outcomes.

Governance exists to balance the unbridled chaos of raw self-service. Governance imposes a set of rules for how resources should be accessed, by whom, at what times, in what quantities, for which purposes. In the same way that traffic rules seek to enable people to use roads to get where they need to go quickly, while eliminating accidents, cloud governance seeks to ensure that cloud usage is well-ordered. And obviously, governance can be taken too far. A cloud governance policy that says that nobody should use clouds at all, for instance, does nothing to promote the well-ordered usage of clouds in the same way that a traffic law that says nobody can drive on roads does not promote use of roads as transportation.

Self-service and governance are the yin yang of cloud computing. When they are out of balance, you have either chaos on one side or the stifling of cloud usage (and cloud benefits!) on the other. When these forces are in balance, you have a well-ordered cloud environment with a maximum of positive business outcomes.

Now, go meditate on that for a while, grasshopper.

“Well, you need more than just a hypervisor,” we say. “That just gives you the basic virtualization layer. You also need a cloud layer that organizes those virtualized resources and exposes them to the outside world as a cloud, with a standard cloud API of some sort. Above that, you then deploy the cloud-independent layers that provide application delivery, workflow, policy management, and governance, represented by something like ServiceMesh Agility Platform.”

While you could build the cloud layer with technology from your hypervisor vendor, there is the potential for unwanted lock-in if you do that. Customers have frequently said that they wished there was a mature, scalable, proven, hypervisor-agnostic open-source option, instead. While a couple of open-source cloud projects have been on the horizon in various stages of development for some time, some with broad industry support, nothing has fit the bill completely.

“I wish there was something like an Apache Cloud project,” customers say. “I want something robust, reliable, open, and liberally licensed.”

Until now, I had to nod and say, “Yea, me too.”

Today, I finally get to say, “There is!”

This morning, Citrix announced that it is contributing its CloudStack technology as the core of a new Apache project: Apache CloudStack. The goal is to deliver a widely available, open cloud implementation technology to enterprises and service providers wanting an AWS-style, IaaS cloud.

One of the biggest benefits of Apache CloudStack is that the technology has already been proven to run at large scale in real clouds (Zynga, Edmunds, Nokia, KT, and GoDaddy, for instance), something that has been sadly lacking with some of the other options. While the Apache CloudStack project is new, the code-base behind it already has the real-world battle scars that characterize mature technology.

CloudStack is hypervisor-agnostic and currently supports Xen, XenServer, Oracle VM (Xen-based), KVM, and VMware. Support for Microsoft Hyper-V is in the works. That provides customers with great flexibility to build clouds however they want and to shift and adjust the lower layers of the stack if they feel the need.

Interestingly, Apache CloudStack will follow a dual-API strategy. First, the project will maintain compatibility with the familiar AWS API, which allows users to leverage tool sets built to work with AWS. Love it or hate it, the AWS API is rapidly becoming the lingua franca of the cloud world. The AWS API has limitations, however, and so the Apache CloudStack project will also expose advanced functionality that is not covered by the AWS API through a parallel CloudStack API. Users can choose whichever API is most convenient and even use both for different reasons at the same time.

For those wary of unsupported open-source projects, Citrix offers a commercial “distro” of Apache CloudStack. Given the liberal Apache license covering the new project, I would expect other commercial options to spring up over time as well.

This is a great day for users who have pined for an open cloud software stack with proven stability, scalability, maturity, and a standard API. Apache CloudStack means that every man can build his own version of AWS, whether you’re working for an enterprise, a service provider or yourself.

Gartner Trend #1: Formal Decision Frameworks Facilitate Cloud Investment Optimization

The key takeaway here is to get organized with the analysis and decision making process surrounding your cloud strategy. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: cloud computing is a big macro trend in the computing industry, as big or bigger than the adoption of the Internet 15 years ago. You need to start factoring cloud computing into your organizational thinking process as soon as possible and doing it in a more formal way. Many organizations are playing with clouds at the departmental level right now, but are failing to give them the strategic focus that such an important macro-trend deserves. It’s time to turn these informal experiments into full-fledged, strategic projects.

Gartner Trend #2: Hybrid Cloud Computing is an Imperative

If you think your organization is going to live either entirely within internal private clouds or external public clouds, you’re fooling yourself. In spite of volatile rhetoric coming from the public cloud proponents that private clouds are somehow illegitimate, every enterprise we are working with is contemplating a future where applications and workloads live both inside and outside, in private and public clouds. Each cloud model provides specific benefits and it will be rare where a company can walk away from one of the models entirely. The dirty little secret for the public cloud industry is that every enterprise ServiceMesh is working with is currently starting with a private cloud strategy for production workloads. This is frequently done to mitigate the perceived risk associated with public clouds. Over time, every organization anticipates shifting appropriate workloads into public clouds as they gain experience and comfort with a cloud operating model and public clouds, realizing that some workloads will never be appropriate for public clouds and thus will remain in-house forever. That may or may not describe your organization. If you’re more comfortable starting with public clouds, that’s fine. Just factor into your strategy planning that hybrid clouds are going to be the norm.

Gartner Trend #3: Cloud Brokerage Will Facilitate Cloud Consumption

Over the past couple of years, Gartner has been pushing the Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) concept. In the past, I think they mispositioned it, focusing on external service providers as CSBs. That was always a disconnect with me because, to be honest, I just don’t see service providers stepping up to the plate. While it may happen over time, most service providers appear to be positioning their own cloud services with customers and seem to have little interest in being true CSBs (there is one notable exception to that, but unfortunately, I’m under NDA and can’t discuss it further).

But in today’s announcement, Gartner says,

“…Gartner believes that IT departments should explore how they can position themselves as CSBs to the enterprise by establishing a purchasing process that accommodates cloud adoption and encourages business units to come to the IT organization for advice and support. The enterprise CSB approach can be implemented by modifying existing processes and tools such as internal portals and service catalogs.”

Gartner nails the problem, but over simplifies the solution, IMO. In the new world of cloud computing, the IT organization necessarily shifts from building and running infrastructure toward facilitating the consumption of cloud services. IT becomes the broker that has thus far remained elusive in the market, building and organizing a complete set of cloud services, and offering those to the rest of the enterprise through a self-service consumption portal. The problem is that existing internal portals and service catalogs aren’t well positioned to be the self-service portal of which Gartner speaks. We need something that is far more dynamic and capable of interacting with cloud services directly. Most existing portals that IT might have deployed are little more than basic service catalogs, suitable for only the simplest of usage scenarios. A much better fit to the problem are the Agility Platform and Agility CenterPoint store, both of which were architected from the ground up to support this functionality and which can provide a cornerstone for this strategy.

Gartner Trend #4: Cloud-Centric Design Becomes a Necessity

While Gartner recognizes the value of migrating existing workloads to the cloud, they advise that enterprises need to start looking to design cloud-centric (what some are calling “cloud-native”) applications. I agree with this. When companies are first starting out with cloud projects, many will focus on the rapid on-boarding of existing applications to deliver an immediate payback that helps justify the cloud project itself. By going after a “quick win,” the cloud project demonstrates immediate, quantifiable business benefit and a success that the organization can point toward to justify further project growth.

But Gartner is right. What then? The cloud offers features like elasticity and workload mobility that simply weren’t possible with pre-cloud models. You can’t take advantage of these features in any reasonably automatic fashion with an application that was simply “lifted and shifted” from a traditional or virtualized environment into the cloud. Instead, we need to shift our thinking that applications run on “machines,” which are now implemented as virtual machines, to one that says applications run on clouds. That mental shift will help drive us forward with cloud-native application design and operations.

Gartner Trend #5: Cloud Computing Influences Future Data Center and Operational Models

In trend #5, Gartner is simply saying that if hybrid clouds are the norm, IT departments will still have to think about building and running their own data centers. Insofar as it is possible, the operating model for that infrastructure should be a cloud operating model. ServiceMesh has been preaching this message for years now, and we agree wholeheartedly with Gartner’s conclusion. Cloud computing is not about simply buying VMs by the hour from an external provider. It’s really about adopting a cloud operating model, a new way of life for the enterprise that recognizes that IT resources will be available in a self-service fashion, billed on demand. You need to optimize your internal operations around this model, and that includes running your data centers as if you are a cloud provider, because you are.

Overall, I was happy to see Gartner’s report. I agree with all the trends they highlighted and I thought they did a good job of delivering prescriptive advice to enterprises. I was very happy to see the message that internal IT departments should start performing the role of cloud service brokers, as that’s the way the early market seems to be shaping up from where I sit.

If you’re an enterprise struggling with these and other pieces of strategic cloud advice, I suggest you reach out and contact ServiceMesh. We are constantly working with enterprises on these issues and we can help lead your cloud initiative to a successful conclusion.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. – March 22, 2012 —

ServiceMesh, provider of the market-leading enterprise-class cloud application management platform for Global 2000 companies, today announced that the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has selected the ServiceMesh Agility Platform as a finalist in the Best Cloud Platform category of the 2012 CODiE Awards for Business Software.  The 27th annual SIIA CODiE Awards recognize excellence in business software, digital content, and education technology. Winners will be announced on Thursday, May 10, 2012, at the CODiE Awards Presentations held in conjunction with the SIIA’s annual All About the Cloud conference.

SIIA evaluates cloud platforms based on their ability to speed deployment of cloud applications, reduce operating costs, support different deployment environments, and provide high levels of governance, security, scalability, flexibility and transparency.

The ServiceMesh Agility Platform is an enterprise cloud application management platform that enables Global 2000 companies to transform their costly and constrained IT services delivery approach into an “everything as a service” model that quickly aligns to business needs. The ServiceMesh Agility Platform is the only enterprise-grade solution on the market that accelerates this transformation by orchestrating the full lifecycle of cloud application delivery independent of the underlying infrastructure. With the Agility platform, customers deliver new applications faster while maintaining compliance, security and governance through flexible policy definition and enforcement. The result is a significant reduction in the cost, complexity, and time-to-market for applications.

The CODiE Awards were established in 1986 to showcase the software and information industry’s finest products and services across multiple software categories. The CODiE Awards hold the distinction of being the industry’s only peer-reviewed awards program, with a panel of seasoned industry experts selecting the nominated products based on live product demonstrations, trial software access and supplementary documentation.

QUOTES AND MULTIMEDIA:

“All of this year’s CODiE Awards finalists should feel proud of making it to this stage. We’re pleased with all of this year’s nominees, and the finalists reflect excellence and innovation in the business software industry,” said Rhianna Collier, vice president of the SIIA Software Division.

“We are extremely gratified to be nominated as a CODiE Award finalist because the recognition comes from industry peers who focus on product features and capabilities that they know can have a measurable impact on the success of customer cloud initiatives,” said Steve Henning, vice president of marketing at ServiceMesh. “The combination of industry accolades, and most importantly, highly satisfied customers testifies to the fact that the Agility Platform can deliver strategic business value and competitive advantages by improving anorganization’s agility and operating costs.”

Learn more about the ServiceMesh Agility Platform.

Request a demonstration of the Agility Platform in action.

View short videos of the Agility Platform capabilities.

Join Agile IT operating model conversations on the ServiceMesh blog.

About ServiceMesh

ServiceMesh provides the industry’s only enterprise cloud application management platform that enables transformative “everything as a service” IT delivery models for
Global 2000 clients. Enterprise customers select ServiceMesh to design and implement IT strategies that offer game changing competitive advantages through a federation of internal and external IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and cloud service providers. Customers use the Agility Platform to automate their plan, build, share, and run lifecycle with the security, governance, transparency, identity management, and policy control required by large enterprises. Some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies in financial services, health care and other IT-intensive industries rely on ServiceMesh to realize quantum improvements in business agility, lower operating costs, and to enable new business and economic models that support their strategic business initiatives.

To learn more, visit www.servicemesh.com.

PR Contacts:

Elyce Ventura
Eastwick
408-470-4870
servicemesh@eastwick.com