ServiceMesh creates "everything as a service" environments

I had an interesting conversation with Dave Roberts about his role of Vice-President, Strategy and Marketing at ServiceMesh. I've spoken to Dave on many other occasions while he held a similar role over at Vyatta. As in the past, Dave was able to take a complex topic and make it simple and compelling. The topic this time was the challenges cloud computing offers to the IT departments of medium and large organizations.

IT is charged with the responsibility of keeping today's systems working, making them extremely reliable, secure and keeping them cost effective. This is increasingly challenging because the environment and the organization's requirements are changing too rapidly to allow a slow, carefully thought out response to each new request.

The folks at ServiceMesh considered the nature and complexity of enterprise IT and developed products and services designed to address the ever changing environment. ServiceMesh hopes to change the way Enterprise IT acquires and delivers services so its customers can quickly respond. This, the company believes, will make it possible for IT to become demand-driven, governed, automated, transparent, and financially geared to maximize the benefit of variable cost infrastructure.

ServiceMesh has focused on creating offerings that support an agile IT operating model that is designed to:

• Help It federate mutliple internal and external clouds. The company believes that this is the way IT will be done in the near term future.
• Provide tools that address the needs for management, governance, security and automation throughout the lifecycle of individual applications or complete workloads.
• Help IT deliver "everything as a service." ServiceMesh believes that Enterprise IT organizations must go beyond today's definitions of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to thinking about and delivering "everything as a service."
• Offer the necessary tools and services making it possible for organizations to actually deliver and consume IT functions using an "everything as a service" model.

Here's how ServiceMesh describes its products

Lifecycle management requires far more than just starting and stopping workloads in the cloud. Agile IT operating models encompass cloud computing, but extend further across an organization’s software development lifecycle, operations, security, corporate governance, and vendor relationships. You need to intelligently govern, manage and secure your applications and platforms as they progress across different roles and stages in the lifecycle. The Agility Platform provides five product modules to accomplish this:

• Agility Planner - helps analysts and architects streamline application migration activities by analyzing and scoring application workloads to evaluate their suitability, create policies for right-sizing and right-placement, and generate recommended service providers for deployment.
• Agility Designer - provides technical users with a graphical workbench to rapidly assemble policy-compliant platforms and applications for on-demand provisioning and portability across multiple cloud service providers.
• Agility CenterPoint - facilitates the sharing and collaboration of cloud assets with fine-grain access controls, search capabilities, notifications and alerts, rating and comments for assets, and role-based usage and billing reports.
• Agility Manager - provides a single interface to streamline deployment and runtime management across any number of cloud providers, including monitoring of running instances and collection of performance and costing information.
Agility Access - delivers federated identity management to the full range of highly dynamic services managed (including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers) along with the Agility Platform itself. It integrates with LDAP, Active Directory, X.500, and others, and supports all common authentication protocols.

Snapshot analysis

While at first glance, the ServiceMesh message appears to be "totally buzzword complient" but somewhat vague and potentially meaningless. As Dave talked through the messages and offered concrete example of what ServiceMesh has actually done for large organizations, it became clear that the company has a broad vision and is actually doing something about it.

The demonstration of their products left me with the impression that a busy IT staffmember would be able to quickly comprehend what each product does and put it to work.

If your company is looking at how to take today's workloads and deploy them as public, private or hybrid cloud services, ServiceMesh deserves consideration. You might enjoy seeing a demonstration as well.