appOrbit today announced it has come out of stealth and unveiled its appOrbit application platform, which allows customers to automate the modeling, delivery, and management of enterprise software onto any modern infrastructure in minutes, not months. The appOrbit platform dramatically speeds up the movement of legacy applications like Siebeltm and Oracletm to any cloud or container infrastructure. It also provides a framework for building, deploying and managing new microservices-based applications that are completely portable to any infrastructure. By freeing enterprise applications from underlying dependencies, companies can speed up release cycles, improve quality and save millions in IT spend, money that can now be applied to net-new innovation. More than twenty customers now use appOrbit and the launch follows a Series A funding round last year led by Kleiner Perkins and joined by Costanoa Ventures.
"We founded appOrbit with the vision to simplify the holistic management of applications regardless of whether three-tier or microservice, cloud-native or legacy enterprise, across any cloud," said Rahul Ravulur, co-founder and CEO, appOrbit. "All applications should be on-demand, self-healing, scalable, composable, secure and completely portable to any environment, not the hard-to-update monoliths trapped on a single infrastructure they are today. Our early customer success is a testament to appOrbit's ability to improve the way organizations manage and modernize their applications."
IT Challenges Slow Digital Transformation
Enterprises are in a race to transform their IT infrastructure and applications. Technologies like cloud, containers, and microservices promise better business agility, stronger competitive position and huge cost savings. But making this journey is challenging when most organizations spend at least 80 percent of their IT budgets just keeping the lights on. IT organizations are looking to respond in an agile fashion, but the cost of failure can be enormous and they have to contend with the high cost of testing cycles. Software development best practices like production-like testing, test data management, and production break-fix take too long. Furthermore, cloud becomes just another silo rather than becoming a common pool of infrastructure. This vendor lock-in reduces choice and increases cost.
"The appOrbit team has validated a unique approach to creating, testing, deploying and managing modern enterprise applications that are completely portable to any infrastructure," said Mike Abbott, general partner at Kleiner Perkins. "We were particularly excited that the platform could be used not only for new app development but also for organizations to update legacy apps."
appOrbit Accelerates Digital Transformation
The container-based appOrbit platform solves these problems by enabling holistic management of new and legacy applications, along with the data they rely on, to run on any cloud or container technology, without changing a single line of code. The platform makes it easy to clone application environments for test data management, new development or production fixes. Using appOrbit, applications can be completely separated from underlying infrastructure and data stores. With this structure, all applications, including their data, can be portable to any virtual machine, cloud or container, anywhere, all without code changes.
"Accelerating application development and deployment is a crucial need as enterprises focus on digital transformation for competitive differentiation," said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of industry analyst firm voke. "The appOrbit platform is a significant advancement that allows enterprise organizations to run both legacy and net-new applications on any infrastructure without code changes, including comprehensive data sources. Our research shows that a mere 9% of organizations are capable of continuous deployment to production. Development, testing, and deployment teams benefit from the appOrbit platform by removing friction and providing a virtualized application environment for development, testing, defect remediation, or planning. This means applications are more reliable, predictable, manageable, and deliver better quality and security."
The appOrbit platform eliminates vendor lock-in and provides enterprises with the complete flexibility to choose any infrastructure that offers the best combination of price, reliability, availability and speed. Customers can also use application blueprints to analyze and break apart monolithic legacy applications and move them, in pieces or as a whole, to modern infrastructure in minutes, not months. This dramatically accelerates application modernization projects. The appOrbit platform enables continuous testing and arms DevOps teams with an automated, point-and-click application management service that drives continuous delivery. The platform also empowers developers with a service that simplifies the process of building, deploying and managing new applications.
Current Customers Enjoy Increased Efficiency
The appOrbit platform is already in use by more than two-dozen companies, including Ericsson, a global information, technology, and communications leader; Infosys, a global leader in technology services and consulting; and KPIT Technologies, a global technology company that specializes in providing IT consulting and product engineering solutions and services.
"With appOrbit, we are now transforming our IT development and test labs from legacy engineering processes dependent on static Dev and Test environments to dynamic, containerized environments," said Mitch Stein, Sr. Architect and DevOps Manager at Ericsson. "We reduced new environment provisioning time from weeks to minutes while leveraging current server and infrastructure investments into an elastic and scalable private cloud through containerization. The appOrbit platform has also jump-started our evolution towards application virtualization and portability at an enterprise scale, including legacy data sources and application monoliths. By separating applications from any dependencies on the underlying environment, we now have complete freedom to choose the right combination of infrastructure and data sources that makes the most business sense for a particular solution, knowing that if we need to move the application in the future, we can do so without any changes to the code. The appOrbit solution is not only a powerful tool for speeding up application modernization, but gives a comprehensive, end-to-end platform for the development, testing, deployment and management of new enterprise applications as well."
"No two clients have the same set of applications and infrastructure requirements," says Nataraj Narayan, SVP & Global Head, IMS Business, KPIT Technologies. "The appOrbit platform allows our clients to manage their applications from one place on any infrastructure, automating their daily operational tasks and unshackling resources used for innovation in their respective industries."
"The appOrbit platform has been instrumental in helping us automate the configuration and deployment of application environments for development and testing," said Hassan M. Al-Sharif, Chief Information Officer at Prospect Medical Holdings. "Using appOrbit, we have been able to streamline and accelerate our entire testing process, which is resulting not only in a more responsive team, but better quality software."
"In our world, we bring clients value through people, process, and technology," says Ramanath Suryaprakash, AVP, Corporate Alliances, Infosys. "Leveraging innovative technologies like the appOrbit platform allows us to meet our clients' digital transformation goals in parallel with simplifying internal processes and allowing employees to realize their full potential. By fully automating environment creation, our clients are able to accelerate time to market, slash infrastructure costs, and radically improve the quality of releases."
The appOrbit platform is available now.
