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Public cloud adoption growth will result from personnel trickle-up

While many organizations have experimented with cloud, few have transitioned major IT operations to it. We spoke recently with Paul Fremantle, CTO at cloud middleware provider WSO2, about cloud adoption trends. WSO2 recently released Stratos 1.5, a comprehensive Platform as a Service (PaaS) designed to help users build and run enterprise level cloud applications.

Fremantle believes that as employees use cloud in their personal lives, trust in the cloud will grow and manifest in the enterprise. “People’s own comfort level is influenced by day to day usage,” said Fremantle. “I used Gmail for a very long time, so when it came to moving some WSO2 infrastructure onto Google I was comfortable because Google had proven its trustworthiness.”

Fremantle sees that same transfer of comfort in other situations. “I was at a conference and a speaker asked, ‘How many developers have used their own credit card to buy an instance on Amazon and test something because your work wasn’t providing you what you needed?’ Many people raised their hands,” said Fremantle.

But Fremantle said a shift in cloud adoption will come from more than just familiarity. Personal cloud usage also facilitates initiative. “These are the people who are going to get promoted. They’re the ones getting the job done,” said Fremantle. “Already you’re seeing people in management positions who were doing that 3 or 4 years ago. They’re the guys who are going to say ‘Yup, let’s move it to Amazon.’”

Growing comfort levels with cloud computing extend beyond developers. “There are many business people who are now getting comfortable with Salesforce, Google spreadsheets, Quickbooks Online, etcetera,” said Fremantle. “They’re getting to the point where they can say I’ve used this stuff, I trust it. And so they’re much more amenable to a high level sale.”

WSO2 Stratos 1.5 was released last week and includes a multi-tenant enterprise service bus (ESB), a complex event processing engine (CEP), data as a service tools for SQL and NoSQL databases, and other cloud technologies. We spoke with Paul Fremantle earlier this month about cloud application governance.

Organizations of all size recognize the need for application integration governance

When it comes to application integration, governance may not be the first technology that comes to mind. Still, it’s an important part of the integration process, and governance technologies are seeing wider user as service-oriented architecture and cloud computing adoption grows.

“A couple of years ago only very large organizations were pushing governance, and it was very much from a top down approach,” said Paul Fremantle, CTO of enterprise service bus and middleware provider WSO2. “We’re beginning to now see everybody wanting an answer.”

WSO2 released a new version of its governance registry last week. Fremantle said that over 90% of users of the WSO2 ESB use a governance registry alongside it.

“What you want to do well with governance is make sure people go through the right review process before they publish a service to the ESB,” said Fremantle. “Typically you want to have a flow from design to development to unit test and system test then onto production.

“To move it from one thing to another you want to have a checklist,” said Fremantle. “Are [developers] reusing schema, or using new schema that has the same data but a different format? Did they go through the review process? Have they got the right security policy on this service?”

Rise of public APIs driving governance and ESB adoption

Fremantle said the recent push towards using public application programming interfaces [APIs] for integration is not much different from the rise of SOA and ESBs. “An API is just a service,” said Fremantle. “The whole drive to APIs is having a big impact on this space.”

ESB as a Service will emerge as integration option over coming years

The ESB as a Service is not in wide use, but industry leaders believe that the demand for the ESB as a Service will grow rapidly in the next few years.

An ESB, or enterprise service bus, is an integration middleware layer that helps integrate applications written in different languages or frameworks. An ESB as a Service would make the functionality of the ESB available over a public or private network.

We recently talked with CTOs at open source ESB providers WSO2 and MuleSoft about the future of the ESB as a Service. For now, the adoption of the ESB as a Service parallels broader cloud adoption trends.

“Large enterprises are pretty conservative,” said Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2. “But we see that attitude, that people are not willing to do things in the public cloud, is changing.”

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