Cloud Technology Partners' PaaSLane Named An AWS Premier Technology Partner

Cloud Technology Partners was born four years ago as a cloud solution provider and quickly found success helping financial services companies and large manufacturers with their cloud migrations.

Those projects often involved migrating thousands of applications from on-premise servers to various public cloud platforms. To assist in those massive endeavors, Cloud Technology Partners developed an on-boarding tool called PaasLane that analyzed applications to assess their cloud readiness and identify problems they would encounter on selected platforms.

The software was so useful in facilitating the migrations that a year ago the Boston-based company created a separate business unit around PaasLane and released it as a stand-alone product.

’We were doing some work on a solutions basis and we realized we invented some technology that was able to automate that process,’ Ben Grubin, director of product management for PaaSLane at Cloud Technology Partners, told CRN.

Since its release, PaaSLane has helped enterprises and service providers fully leverage the power of the Amazon Web Services platform by accelerating optimization of Java and .Net applications. That commitment to Amazon was recognized Tuesday as Cloud Technology Partners revealed that PaaSLane was named an Amazon Web Services Premier Technology Partner.

’Obviously, AWS is the market leader. From a public cloud perspective, they have a massive amount of business that’s growing, so there’s some high bars you have to jump over to be an advanced technology partner. So we’ve clearly made a commitment to them,’ Grubin told CRN.

PaaSLane automates code analysis to identify issues applications will face in various cloud environments before migrations are attempted. The software plows through source code looking for blockers for certain platforms, optimizations and remediation solutions.

The tool empowers solution providers to quickly identify applications that can be moved seamlessly to the cloud, and understand the roadblocks that will impede the migration of others.

That’s a technology that can help IT professionals avoid major headaches in an age in which enterprises manage complex portfolios of applications sometimes numbering in the thousands, Grubin said.

’If you just bring out applications and move them to the cloud without thinking about it, all sorts of problems happen,’ Grubin told CRN.

’We help you modernize your apps in preparation for moving them to the cloud,’ he told CRN.

In reviewing source code, PaaSLane applies hundreds of rules developed by Cloud Technology Partners’ research and development team, Grubin told CRN, adding the team is always developing new and enhanced rules.

About 80 percent of those rules just enforce best practices for modernizing and migrating applications. Many of the rules are specific to cloud vendors such as AWS, Google or to open-source environments such as the CloudFoundry platform.

PaasLane also can go beyond looking at source code. The tool analyzes some configuration and property files packaged with applications, and when source code isn’t available, it can decompile an application for analysis.

The final product is a cloud-readiness score for each application, and a red light/green light analysis to inform solution providers attempting migrations.

PaaSLane offers three solutions for AWS.

PaaSLane Assess analyzes applications for cloud readiness and optimization. PaaSLane Optimize integrates with the software development life cycle to ensure applications are continuously optimized for the AWS platform. PaasLane Manage is an enterprise application portfolio management system.

Grubin told CRN the next step is to go from static to dynamic profiling, meaning PaaSLane will be able to analyze applications as they are running, providing even more information about their suitability for the cloud environment.

’There’s a lot of fun work to be done,’ Grubin said.

PUBLISHED JUNE 24, 2014