Verizon Cloud hooks Cloudbees as a partner

Continuous Delivery is coming to the recently announced Cloud Services division of Verizon, through the announcement of a new partnership with Platform as a Service (PaaS) and service development specialist, Cloudbees.

This should provide Verizon’s cloud customers, and the company itself, with new tools with which to organise change management, one of the key problems that the agility of working with cloud-delivered services can force onto companies.

The partnership is part Verizon’s ongoing strategy to add enterprise-class services to Verizon Cloud, the company’s new cloud computing and cloud storage platform, creating an ecosystem of enterprise technologies in the cloud.

According to Cloudbees CEO, Sacha Labourey, Continuous Delivery (CD) is very much the coming trend in the development of cloud applications and services. “With CD the idea is that new developments are pushed out to users as they happen. There is no need for either the development team or the users to wait for the next release cycle, which can be as long as 18 months,” he said.

Such an approach raises a possible fear for many users, however, particularly of incipient anarchy building slowly across an organisation as different divisions or departments find different additions and updates of value. This can lead to the potential of an application lifecycle management quagmire.

Labourey, however, does see this possibility arising. “The name Continuous Delivery can be misleading,” he said. “In practice it means giving businesses the chance to reduce their software inventory and give them new ways in which they can organise the management of change.”

This is likely to be of particular importance when it comes to cloud-delivered services where the potential for greater business agility is based on the ability to add and change applications and services rapidly in order to meet changing market needs.

This is therefore something of a market requirement for service providers such as Verizon Cloud, which naturally sees itself as being the businesses expected to deliver such agility.

Verizon Cloud is still in its public beta-test phase, but it already includes a IaaS platform, Verizon Cloud Compute, and an object-based storage service, Verizon Cloud Storage. These have been developed with a breadth of market in mind, covering both enterprise requirements , and the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, individual IT departments and software developers.

“We are working with best-in-class enterprise technology companies to bring additional value to our customers above the core availability, performance and security we’ve built into Verizon Cloud.” said John Considine, chief technology officer at Verizon Terramark. “CloudBees is a leading PaaS provider with an experienced team.  We’re pleased to formalise this long-standing relationship with CloudBees and its proven service for our customers’ benefit.”

Labourey sees the majority of Cloudbee’s business being directly with Verizon Cloud customers, though he acknowledged that there is still education needed amongst potential cloud end users as to what cloud can offer and how they can benefit from it.

“There is still a big education need,” he said, “and it is a problem we are all facing. There is a need to find simple messages about what cloud can offer. There is still a need to identify the use cases that deliver business-related messages.”

So he sees this as an integral part of the partnership with Verizon. In this respect, he sees the partnership benefiting from Verizon’s existing partnerships, especially with the likes of major business applications vendors such as SAP and Oracle.

But as well as customers, Labourey also sees Verizon itself starting to exploit the Cloudbees platform as it starts to build out its own range of business focused services.   

“There are possibilities in this area, such as offering consultancy services,” he said. “But I don’t expect too much of it at the moment. A company like Verizon can easily end up trying to do too much.”