CliQr Unveils Updated CloudCenter with IT-as-a-Service

Thousands of AWS fans, customers and third parties are in Las Vegas this week for the AWS: reinvent show.

Cloud migration vendor CliQr is there as well, and today announced a new version of its CloudCenter platform that now features IT-as-a-Service.

CliQr believes its migration and management tool can help move IT out of the shadows and into the light.

“Leading organizations are quickly realizing that, rather than try to stop the growth of shadow IT initiatives, in fact companies can harness and appropriately nourish this push towards accelerated innovation through cloud-based IT as a Service,” said Gaurav Manglik, CEO and co-founder of CliQr Technologies. “CliQr’s CloudCenter provides an integrated platform that allows IT to manage and enforce multiple users, applications and clouds—private and public—all with a single solution. CliQr’s platform provides the tipping-point IT has been desiring to take advantage of the benefits that the cloud has promised for years.”

The new rev of CloudCenter offers access to clouds and applications based on roles. “CloudCenter, which provides for governance based on IT policies and practices, also allows applications to be published, monitored, metered and managed within private app stores,” the company said.

This latest version can be used to build a single instance of storage that can be shared by multiple users, and volumes can be allocated to individuals based on quotas.


Image via Shutterstock

“The out-of-the box distributed file system architecture is the first of its kind to be implemented across all clouds, making CliQr the first secured “NAS on the cloud” solution for the enterprise. Corporations will immediately see the benefits of a scalable-shared storage with improved efficiency of usage and reduced cumulative cost of cloud storage,” the company said. “In addition, CloudCenter introduces fine-grained control over access to applications and helps create a cloud based on users, user-groups or roles. This new feature, along with the reporting and auditing capabilities of the CliQr platform will allow enterprises to monitor user activities based on permissions, and maintain hierarchy of roles—all from a single pane of glass.”

Gartner (News - Alert) Bullish on IaaS, AWS

In Gartner’s latest ‘Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service,’ AWS far outstripped its rivals. “AWS is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other fourteen providers in this Magic Quadrant. It is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices. It has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes its service one of the few suitable for batch computing, especially for workloads that require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time,” the research house said.

The AWS ecosystem has grown out of AWS’ success and is now adding to it. “AWS has a very large technology partner ecosystem. Many software vendors have specially licensed and packaged their software to run on EC2, either independently or via the AWS Marketplace, which eases deployment and eliminates some of the challenges associated with licensing software to run in the cloud.”

Migration Competition

CliQr isn’t the only cloud migration vendor. MSP Today has been covering two other players.

CloudVelocity’s One Hybrid Cloud “essentially automates the application provisioning process by replicating core system files, tweaking for Amazon EC2’s resource parameters, and creating a new application on Amazon’s infrastructure (One Hybrid Cloud only works with Amazon EC2 currently) via an encrypted channel,” the company said. “By default the software replicates all of the systems into the cloud but IT architects can modify the list of replicated directories and services if so desired – say, in the event sensitive data cannot be moved to the cloud.”

The idea is to clone your applications, even multi-tier app clusters, so they can run on AWS.

Numecent has a similar approach it calls Native as a Service or NaaS, which leverages the vendor’s cloudpaging technology. What exactly is cloudpaging? Cloudpaging is a new form of virtualization, really a form of application virtualization. It takes existing packaged apps, and like other forms of application virtualization, turns them into a service. In this case, the application can be streamed from the cloud.

And like CloudVelocity, Numecent runs on AWS.

The NaaS service is multi-tenant out of the box, can be white-labeled by partners. The service is also boosted by a worldwide Content Delivery Network.

Numecent was co-founded by Osman Kent, who sold his previous company 3Dlabs for $170 million just over a decade ago to Creative Labs. Kent apparently found about Endeavors and its application virtualization technology, quickly swallowed it up, and rebranded as Numecent.