As software development moves to the Cloud, we had the chance to discuss this evolution with Rajesh Ramchandani, who is the Founder and VP of Products of CumuLogic, a new company that is active in the Java in the Cloud market. The company was founded and is backed by former Sun executives with James Gosling as an advisor.

Rajesh Ramchandani is founder and vice president of products at CumuLogic. He has more than 18 years of experience in the software industry, with over 10 years of hands-on experience in Java, middleware, and application tuning. He has extensive knowledge in Utility Computing technologies and Cloud Computing. Rajesh was responsible for market development and for building the partner ecosystems to drive cloud computing revenue for Sun Microsystems.

What is the strategy of CumuLogic’s?

CumuLogic is a software provider that enables enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs to build and manage Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. We are one of the first companies to offer a full Java PaaS for federated clouds. Today, many cloud software vendors are focused on Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS), creating a huge opportunity on the side of PaaS. Our team knew that focusing on PaaS through enabling Java in the cloud would be an interesting and challenging problem to solve. Secondly, the core founding team is from Sun Microsystems and knows how to bring value in providing Java solutions to enterprises.

Why did you choose to be a pure software provider and not a service provider?

We see a bigger opportunity and challenges in the on-premise (private) PaaS space. Being a pure play software provider, we can serve a larger market: enterprises, cloud providers and ISVs. We do have the same PaaS software on Amazon EC2, but we see that as an entry point for our customers. Our typical beta customer normally registers to try out our PaaS on Amazon, and then comes back to download the software so that he/she can test inside their datacenter.

What is your relationship with infrastructure companies like Citrix or VMware, Java-related product support (Glassfish, Tomcat…), and non Java-related products support (MySQL, MongoDB, …)?

For most enterprises, choice of infrastructure components and portability are key requirements. Enterprises tend to choose best-of-breed infrastructure components, and want these components to interoperate in order to build highly reliable solutions. Hence, CumuLogic architected a private PaaS that allows you to choose infrastructure components, such as application servers, databases, messaging servers, etc., and that enterprises can deploy in their datacenters. With our PaaS, you also have the capability to choose the underlying cloud infrastructure, including Citrix CloudStack, Eucalyptus, VMware vSphere and OpenStack. And if you want to deploy on a public cloud, CumuLogic PaaS also runs on Amazon EC2.

On the Java application server side, we support the most commonly used open source containers, including JBoss, Glassfish, Tomcat, and Jetty. We have a lot of experience in managing and supporting these infrastructure components in addition to strong partnerships with vendor partners.

What differentiate CumuLogic with its competitors, especially other Java-focused companies like CloudBees or Jelastic?

We believe that what sets CumuLogic apart are all the enterprise-ready features. For example, we are a private PaaS software provider, which means we provide the software so organizations can deploy their own PaaS in their own datacenters, or on public clouds. This is important for enterprises which are sensitive to compliance and security aspects of public clouds. We don’t see any other offering other than open source Cloud Foundry for Java as Private PaaS.

Another important enterprise-ready feature is the support for multiple clouds, which allows multiple private and/or public clouds to be supported at the same time, therefore avoiding cloud (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) vendor lock-in.

Our platform is also designed to be self-healing and fault-tolerant so you can deploy scalable and highly available applications. And our ability to offer mix-and-match of middleware software components enables the deployment of modern applications, as well as the consolidation of legacy Java applications to a single platform, substantially lowering the cost of managing the myriad of existing Java applications in enterprises.

Most importantly, we provide complete visibility into the cost analysis of applications running in clouds. None of the other PaaS vendors offer this level of visibility into the usage at the application level. This is a key feature for enterprises that need to charge back their business units.

What is the target customer of CumuLogic?

CumuLogic focuses on delivering a private PaaS which provides end-to-end managed infrastructure services for Java applications. More specifically, on PaaS for enterprises that deploy private clouds and use public clouds for limited workloads and therefore need a comprehensive PaaS solution that can span across private and public clouds.

Enterprises, and SaaS ISVs can achieve huge benefits from PaaS deployment as well. ISVs are able to see increased speed of development which results in faster time to market; in an era where technology is constantly being released, ISVs, as well as enterprises need to be able to get their product to market as fast as possible. PaaS virtually eliminates the need for IT administrators to manage the underlying infrastructure allowing IT to focus on delivery high quality performance and improved SLAs.

Our customers are medium to large enterprises that are looking for PaaS to either meet big spikes in traffic (i.e. retail and media companies), or are looking for PaaS to consolidate Java applications to a single, homogeneous platform.

How do you see the competition between “large” players (Red Hat, Salesforces.com’s Heroku) and “small” start-up like you in the cloud market?

We see that all incumbent middleware providers entering the PaaS market will cause vendor lock-in and will not provide a platform agnostic to the underlying IaaS clouds or middleware components. We differentiate ourselves from providing a feature-rich solution which is cloud-agnostic, hypervisor-agnostic and most importantly provides mix-and-match of several infrastructure components that integrate well to provide highly scalable and reliable PaaS. For users who want flexibility to choose their virtualization or IaaS clouds, hypervisors, middleware stacks without getting locked-in to a particular vendor, CumuLogic PaaS is an ideal solution.

What effort is needed to migrate Java application to CumuLogic’s PaaS platform?

Migrating Java applications to the CumuLogic platform requires very little effort. Depending on the applications and how they use datasources and files on local filesystems, migration of applications is a fairly simple task. Certain apps may need a few code changes, but most will not.