Intalio Upgrades Cloud Platform to Look More Like Salesforce
Intalio, whose application server is used by Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Twitter, has announced an upgrade to its cloud software, Intalio Cloud Summer '10, that allows companies to run the equivalent of Salesforce.com's offerings in a private cloud (in the bank's own data centers), on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, Rackspace, Azure or Savvis, or in a hybrid configuration that straddles both worlds.
Intalio's cloud applications include Intalio BPM for business process management, Intalio CRM for customer relationship management, Intalio DMS for document management, Intalio Social Portal for social collaboration, and Intalio Web Office for online productivity. The company's platform-as-a-service layer includes tools for database application development, enterprise mashups, process automation, and reporting. Its infrastructure-as-a-service components include on-demand compute, storage and database resources, as well as a web-based application provisioning tool that can be used by system administrators and business users.
For this new release, Intalio expanded its virtualization support from VMware only to include Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen. "The problem with VMware is it takes a lot of memory," says Ismael Ghalimi, CEO, who spoke to BS&T in an interview Friday (while he was theoretically on vacation in Hawaii). "So if you have five users or less for an app, it might not be cost effective."
Along with adding more business applications to its cloud software, Intalio has also changed its object model to reflect Salesforce's: "what they call an account we call an account," Ghalimi says. Intalio has also created a Salesforce-compatible API that allows Salesforce customers to use their favorite Salesforce software in a private cloud. "If you're a bank, there are many things you can't run on the public cloud for regulatory reasons," Ghalimi notes. "So we give you the same features you've learned to like from Salesforce or Google Docs or Amazon, behind the firewall in your data center."
For banks that like the "elasticity" of using an external cloud provider — in other words, the ability to grab more computing power as needed (for instance, to support a six-month development project), Intalio supports the running of a cloud environment across internal data centers and Amazon EC2. "If you're a large business you can cloudburst — take any application running in your private cloud and move it to a public cloud like Amazon on the fly," Ghalimi says. "We do that using a very easy tool we call our Cloud Controller."
Ghalimi says that for banks that have virtualized many of their servers but haven't tried to create a private cloud yet, turning their environment into a cloud is not difficult. "Most banks we walk into already have vmWare deployed on tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of servers," he says. "That creates a perfect infrastructure for us to lay our cloud software on top of." He says it typically takes less than a month to integrate Intalio tools and cloudify such an environment.
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