The Rise of the Application
Oracle’s bid for Sun has officially sucked the air out of this week’s news cycles.
And for good reason—it has the potential to truly change the face of the IT landscape, pitting Larry of the Emerald Towers against the stalwart incumbents of the enterprise datacenter. This is a story we’ll all follow closely for some time.
In other news this week, rPath announced its plans to redefine application delivery and systems management. Certainly, I’d be disingenuous to suggest that I’m not at least slightly lamenting the timing of our news, which—while, important—may struggle to rise above the din of the Oracle/Sun announcement.
But I actually see an important coincidence in the timing of these events.
You see, rPath believes deeply that IT has lost its way and has become far too focused on infrastructure, rather than applications. As a company, rPath has set out to reorient the world to the notion of application-centric—rather than server-centric—system management. In this model, operating system, middleware and tooling are subservient to the application, which becomes the unit of management.
rPath creates ready-to-run systems based on a specific understanding of an application’s dependencies, which are discovered automatically. These dependencies determine which pieces of infrastructure need to be bound to the application and the end result is a self-contained system that’s ready to be deployed and managed in any traditional, virtual or cloud-based environment.
Read the Cutter essay on this approach: http://tinyurl.com/rethinkingappdelivery
Or watch the YouTube cartoon: http://www.rpath.com/corp/rethinking
It’s an idea whose time has come—because it seems we’ve forgotten what matters. What matters is the application, not infrastructure. Its time has come because IT organizations desperately need to right-size expenses and find a way “to do more with less.” Its time has come because applications are becoming unthinkably complex and making general-purpose layers of infrastructure work with them is just too darn hard. Finally, its time has come because emerging deployment models like virtualization and cloud literally force a change in orientation from infrastructure to application.
This is all by way of saying that that Oracle’s foray into the rarified world of the enterprise datacenter portends an interesting trend that I find both poetic and prophetic: The rise of the application.
Oracle, the application company, is subsuming a major infrastructure player. Why? Who knows what the real reasons are (I’ll leave that to the analysts), but the one that’s playing out in my head ties back to this notion of application centricity. It may be exactly what they have in mind. Or this may be nothing more than the eternal optimist trying to find meaning in a stolen news cycle.
In either case, listen to Larry as he envisions this merged future:
“Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system - applications to disk - where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit, as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”
Of course, he’s talking about Oracle applications, vertically integrated and optimized for simple, cost-effective and low-risk deployment and management.
rPath’s vision is to make Larry’s statement relevant to any application—custom or commercial—that an enterprise wants to deploy. rPath automates the creation and maintenance of self-contained systems that begin with the application and end with a dramatically simplified way to deploy and manage systems.
What if we started with the presumption of an application and only focused on infrastructure to the extent it directly and specifically supported the needs of that application? I bet we would find that the lion’s share of time and expense simply washed away. In my opinion, it’s a transformational thought for a moment in time when IT needs nothing short of a good, honest transformation.
If you ask me, it’s all about the application. Everything else is just noise.
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