GCJ: Tell our readers about 3Tera, who you are, what you do, and what makes you unique.

Armijo: 3Tera is a developer of grid and utility computing solutions based in Southern California. We are focused on delivering a grid operating system to our hosting partners that enables them to provide utility computing services to their customer base. Our system is called AppLogic, and it converts standard servers into fully scalable shared grids that are easy to manage. It enables existing software to be packaged into completely self-contained, portable applications that can be deployed to servers on demand on any AppLogic grid. AppLogic is the first grid operating system to run and scale transactional Web applications, we have not seen other solutions specifically trying to enable utility computing in this way, and working with the hosting industry. We think that's unique.

GCJ: OK, and is the focus on hosting specifically, or are there other markets you're focusing on?

Armijo: Our focus is specifically on working with hosting partners, and helping them to tap new markets. While we do work with a few enterprise customers, it's through our partner relationships.

GCJ: And that's North America, primarily?

Armijo: At the moment, all of the public announcements are in North America. We are working with a couple of international firms as well.

GCJ: And what about funding of the company, number of customers, number of employees?

Armijo: We're self-funded. More than half of the all of the money invested into 3Tera has come from the management team and the employees here. We have a small number of select private investors, but no institutional VCs at this point in time. So we are not your typical deep-pocketed Silicon Valley VC-backed firm. We're very pragmatic and creative, because we're spending our own money.

Number of full-time employees is 12, and the total number of people involved in the project is around 20, including some folks in Eastern Europe, Israel, Northern California - and one in Washington, DC now as well.

GCJ: Can you give us overview of AppLogic, the product - what it is and what it does?

Armijo: AppLogic is a grid operating system that allows our hosting partners to take the commodity hardware equipment that they're already using-nothing more than Intel or AMD-based servers, gigabit ethernet, and direct-attached storage - and turn that into grids; shared resource pools that they can use to provide services for their customers. Those services can run the gamut from simple Web hosting, through virtual private servers, all the way through to full utility computing for complex distributed systems where the customer can actually define the infrastructure that is necessary for his application. AppLogic will create that infrastructure on the grid for the customer while his application operates.

GCJ: Is that an automatic creation, or is there user intervention required?

Armijo: The user simply defines the topology, and at that point it's automatic.

GCJ: And it's just any available resource on the Net, or is that defined as well?

Armijo: It's any available resource on the grid. AppLogic grids don't span the globe. They are purpose-built grids specifically for providing utility services by our hosting partners.

GCJ: So the term, grid operating system, another operating system - is the world ready for one, and do we really need one?

Armijo: We think the world is ready for a simpler way to run Web applications without having to think about all the hardware that actually is providing the horsepower to it.

Over the last ten to 15 years we have gone from using large SMP-based systems to using more commodity-based Intel and AMD-based servers. As a result, we've developed what some people have termed server sprawl. Instead of running an application on one server, we now run it on a distributed architecture of 20, 30, 60 or even more servers. And of course, there are some, like Google, that run on tens of thousands of servers.

We need a way to easily control applications that span physical resources, allowing people to stop managing hardware. That's what our grid operating system does. It is not an operating system in the sense of requiring people to write code specifically for it. Rather, it is an operating system in the sense that it abstracts and manages the distributed hardware grid and enables people to focus on their applications without having to make them "grid-aware".

In technical terms, AppLogic is a meta-operating system. It actually uses Linux within it. This allows people to run any Linux software they want on top of AppLogic without rewriting their code. This is incredibly important, because as you mentioned, we don't think the world is ready for another port of all of their software to another set of interfaces.

GCJ: I wanted to touch on something further there, in your comment on machine sprawl or server sprawl. There's also the corollary to that, the virtual machine sprawl. How does the AppLogic grid operating system deal with the idea of virtual machines in that context?

Armijo: A large part of the customer base is just learning what virtual machine sprawl is, because the pitch for the last two years has been that virtualization will solve all your server sprawl problems. It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. In fact, virtualization, in many cases, makes the problem more complex because you can't point to a machine anymore and say that machine is X. Now that machine is XYZ, ABC, and D.

I was involved in a company called Topspin a few years back, and we got customers that were running thousands of nodes using virtualization. The problem of managing the virtual machine images was so complex that they spent the vast majority of their time actually working on that, and not actually building their applications.

AppLogic allows customers to stop thinking about physical hardware and virtual machines by providing a higher-level construct; the application. Users provide AppLogic the definition of their application infrastructure just as it would be drawn on a white board today, and from that point on AppLogic manages it completely in an automated fashion. So if new resources are required, or even if the customer wants to move it from one grid to another, they no longer operate on physical hardware, or even on a virtual machine basis. They operate on an application basis. They can take an application running on 20 or 30 servers on the grid and migrate it around the world to another grid with a single command, and it'll run.

GCJ: There's no cross-network - so it works across subnets or across networks?

Armijo: In that instance, AppLogic will assign the application a new IP address, but it's a simple matter to use a secondary DNS service that will provide a buffer layer so users don't see the IP address change.

GCJ: Interesting. Thank you, that was great - great answer, by the way. Back to your solutions that you're providing and the focus. We talked a little bit about hosting. I noticed on your Web site there was some talk about open source and some other solutions. The focus is the hosting market today. What's the future? What other markets are you going to go after?

Armijo: As we see it right now, we have a few years of building out in the hosting market. We have by no means saturated it either in terms of breadth or the feature set that we can deliver. So for the next two to three years, our focus is strongly in the hosting market and enabling hosting partners to provide complete utility services.

If you take a look at the ROI of actually purchasing hardware, it doesn't seem to work in the favor of anybody but the largest enterprises. So we provide our grid technology to hosting partners and allow them to expand their services and bring more and more customers away from buying their own hardware and into using the hosted utility services. The future is software-as-a-service. The next Google's, Amazon's and Saleforce.com's will be able to focus on developing their services and getting their applications to market, without having to worry about the operations and cost of the infrastructure required to support Internet-scale demand.

GCJ: And then is there any vertical market work that's done in conjunction with that? I know hosting's pretty broad.

Armijo: Hosting is a very broad market. At the moment, the focus is on some of the traditional hosting applications where our hosting partners already have customers and they can see the immediate ROI. The advantage for them of using AppLogic is that it allows them to provide new services within the existing product set. For instance, within their virtual private server or dedicated server market or within their Web hosting product, they can now add high availability as a result of the grid offering. AppLogic also allows them to unify the infrastructure for all of their product offerings onto the grid, which saves them a great deal of money. Beyond that, we see new services such as dedicated grids, backup services, and storage services that they'll be able to bring to market that weren't easy to provide before.

So in terms of vertical markets, we do not have a vertical market focus at the moment. We do have some partners that do have vertical market focuses, and we are supporting them with specific features as needed. But within 3Tera, we do not have a vertical focus.

GCJ: OK. So this year we've had a lot of FUD, for a lack of a better word, surrounding virtualization, grid, SOA, utility computing, Web services - pick your technology, throw it in a bucket. A lot of this around what we once considered "grid computing." I'd be interested to see what your take is on it and what 3Tera's approach is to this, and what technology you think will win, or what the outcome will be surrounding all of these technologies.

Armijo: It's interesting, because a lot of what's written seems to be written from one viewpoint or another. It's written by somebody who's interested in virtualization or interested in grid or interested in utility computing. We believe that these things are all related to each other. When we look at what we're doing with our partners, we see that, in fact, we are using virtualization to help us build a grid which allows our partners to provide utility computing services. So, we don't see these technologies as separate, or in any way an either/or situation. We treat them as parts of a whole, so we're concerned not about the technology per se, but the services customers experience. We're concerned about bringing to market services that customers can use to accelerate their businesses.

When we talk to people about grid we find there is disagreement as to what a grid is. But there is a clear pattern of the characteristics people expect of grids. They're not interested in the technical definition. Customers think of high availability, commodity hardware, and they imagine it all being hooked together and them not having to think about the hardware resources they're using.

We all owe an awful lot to Ian Foster for helping to give us a vision for building grids. Customers, however, have taken that vision and they're distilling it down to a set of services and features that they think a grid should provide them with. We're really focused on leveraging that aspect, the customer expectations, and using that as our guiding principle for delivering new features.

So, what is a grid in the hosting market? The answer is evolving. There's a new class of technology emerging combining grid architecture and virtualization technologies to deliver what, in the not to distant past, many considered the "Holy Grail". The result will be new more user friendly systems. AppLogic is the first example of this new technology.

GCJ: Great. You mentioned some partnerships there and working with your partners. Is there a couple of partners you'd like to highlight what you're doing with or detail?

Armijo: Our partnerships fall into two categories at the moment, hosting partners and technology partners. On the hosting side, UtilityServe was the first hosting partner to bring AppLogic to market and more recently we've teamed up with Layered Technologies on their new GridLayer offering. On the technology side, we're working with several companies that want to offer their software on AppLogic as pre-packaged virtual appliances.

GCJ: And then from a competition standpoint, who are your competitors and what's your differentiation?

Armijo: Considering the way people are using AppLogic today, there really isn't a direct competitor. Some of our partners in the hosting industry have tried to piece together solutions from disparate pieces in the past. They tried to purchase storage virtualization and server virtualization and some management layer, and integrate it all together into a service. Unfortunately they very quickly found out exactly how difficult that really is. What they end up with is just a provisioning solution limited to the virtual machine management scope. They don't have an application level scope to them. To deploy applications on them you still need huge amounts of highly qualified IT labor. Customers that have tried to do this on their own are usually the ones that respond the strongest to AppLogic and become our absolute best partners, because they understand the value we are bringing to them before we actually even install the first grid with them.

But right now, there is no direct competitor that really offers the same level of services as AppLogic. That doesn't say that there won't be at some point in time. We've cut a path through the forest, and if people decide that where we're going is valuable, they will be following us. But at the moment, the only way to get the same result is to try and piece together a provisioning solution from a set of disparate parts and then add generous amounts of professional services on top. And as I said, it's extremely difficult and expensive. AppLogic puts it all together and then adds a new management construct on top, or a new level of abstraction if you wish - the application layer. That provides the ability to manage things at a very high level while making it much easier.

It's amazing - especially for me having been in this business for more than 25 years and having run a lot of software, that I can now launch complex applications without thinking about where they're running. It's addictive, in a way, because it becomes so powerful.

GCJ: Good point. What about from in terms of customers or case studies? Do you have one or two you could talk to, describing usage of AppLogic and the business benefits?

Armijo: We're still a young company, so we only have a few folks that have gone public with the fact that they're using AppLogic. The first was International News Media, which is an Internet marketing company providing a press release distribution, RSS feed system. They typically would be considered a Web 2.0 company. They were one of the first users of AppLogic. In fact, they actually took their service live on AppLogic during our beta and have been running on it now for six months or so, and have used probably just about every release of AppLogic that we've put out.

The primary benefit that International News Media is getting from AppLogic is the ability to divorce their software from the hardware, and then stretch their application without concern for the hardware boundaries. They can add resources without having to rebuild the application and move databases and all of the other rigmarole that usually goes with that. They've probably quadrupled the resources behind their application over the last few months.

Another one that has gone public with their use of AppLogic is Etelos. They're an Office 2.0 startup out of the Seattle area. They provide a number of hosted applications, and they use AppLogic as a way to make those applications portable, provide backups, and offer scalability to their customers.

GCJ: Great. Thank you. So what's on the docket for 3Tera next year? What big announcements or developments will our readers see or would you like to point out?

Armijo: In terms of technology there are a number of new capabilities on the roadmap such as adding new monitoring capabilities and working with partners to bring more pre-packaged software onto the system. We're going to be adding Windows support to the system, which is slated for rollout to beta in the first half of next year. On the business side, we are working with some very interesting companies and we will be really excited to announce those as we enter into 2007.

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