In the application economy, it is all about time to application delivery and focus on optimizing the entire application lifecycle. With the sustained "cloudification" of IT, supporting multiple applications while reducing cost and complexity in a multi-cloud environment becomes very critical.  Most companies suffer from application sprawl with scripting, complex workflows and a cumbersome ticket-based approach defining the application rollout.  It is therefore no surprise that many companies hit the "pause" button especially when they are not in a position devise a clear strategy to automate and manage applications in a multi-cloud environment. Unfortunately, this puts them in a holding pattern and at a competitive disadvantage vs. others that are willing to take a more proactive role to transforming the application lifecycle.

The good news is several innovative solutions today are cropping up to address this problem. For its part as a leading infrastructure vendor Cisco is making it really easy to program and automate infrastructure, as well as focus on solutions that build private clouds or establish a mature hybrid cloud presence. Cisco's UCS portfolio, open NX-OS capability across the Nexus family of switches, SDN controller-based solutions like the Virtual Topology System (VTS) as well as industry-leading innovations like Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) are all making rapid strides in this direction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygpy4QGvO3Y

The Cisco ACI approach has been focused on making networks (and other network infrastructure components) more application centric for traditional data center as well as cloud-based deployments embracing a mix of Cisco innovations, open source, open APIs as well as a very robust open ecosystem. Several established players as well as innovative startups have seen value in coming on board this ecosystem and delivering joint solutions to customers. One such exciting startup is CliQr, located in Santa Clara -the heart of the Silicon Valley.

CliQr's vision has a lot of synergies with how Cisco views the happenings in this space. was A little while ago, I sat down with Gaurav Manglik -the CEO of CliQr to discuss how they are in a position to "model, migrate and manage" their application workloads in a multi-cloud environment as well as the benefits customers experience as a result of their integration with Cisco ACI.. The "single pane of glass" approach across public, private or hybrid deployments is also a huge step forward for customers that are in the process of optimizing their cloud strategy accelerating application migration where required. Much like the ACI vision, CliQr's entire approach is very application centric with an "application first" approach, de-coupling the application profiles from the underlying network, compute or storage infrastructure, while at the same time allowing deployments to take a more holistic view that reconciles both the application and infrastructure requirements. In much the same way that ACI levrages Application Network Profiles, CliQr also leverages the concept of application profiles as a starting point.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. The discussion with Gaurav also features ademoat 3.58 seconds in the above video. Take a look and share your thoughts with us.