AppZero: An Enabler of New Technology Adoption

"AppZero’s products and services provide a fast, flexible way to move server applications to a cloud or datacenter, without code change.”

Every product introduced in the market has an expiry date. As newer products are introduced on the anvil, the older ones get pushed back and slowly reach their expiry. Along with the product’s end comes the end of support provided by the company. This is the case with Microsoft’s Windows Server Operating System. Three different versions of Microsoft Server Operating Systems are reaching End of Support within the next 10 years. This poses a real challenge for companies that have invested millions of dollars in applications that run on those platforms. The average Microsoft Custom Support Agreement (CSA) is 25M over 3 years. With 3 different versions of the Windows Operating Systems expiring, there is a significant problem for large enterprises, most of which have not budgeted properly for server modernization.

Incorporated in 2010, AppZero offers a software product solution to automate the migration of applications from these older Operating Systems. Automation provides companies with choice when it comes to migrating legacy applications and porting the applications to the newer OS to satisfy audit / compliance and avoid the hefty CSA costs. The market for Windows Server 2003 modernization alone (which reached End of Service in June 2015) is over 10M servers worldwide. Windows Server 2008 reaches End of Support before 2020. Many enterprises are creating 3-year programs to address their Windows Server 2003 challenges and will pivot quickly to Windows Server 2008 modernization. In terms of Windows 2008 footprint, some estimates are 10 times the current Windows Server 2003 numbers. Application and Windows Server Modernization will be a dominant issue for enterprises for the next 10+ years.

Decoupling Applications and Making Them Portable
AppZero software is an enabler of new technology adoption by offering the ability to decouple applications and make them portable. This functionality plays well with the enterprise’s ongoing needs to modernize applications, consolidate datacenters, and move to the cloud. AppZero uses containerization, which is becoming the next evolution in virtualization with major companies like Microsoft, Google, Docker, and VMware making significant investments in this space. As open standards emerge around application containerization, AppZero will integrate with those standards to support automation and orchestration initiatives.

The Differentiating Factor
AppZero’s key differentiator is that no other company does what AppZero does – which is to port just the core applications from OS to OS. Other P2V / V2V technologies simply clone the entire OS + applications from one place to another – they cannot decouple the application from the source OS and migrate it to a newer OS. Application decoupling and containerization unlock portability – where the application can be on any newer Windows Server OS that’s on-premise, in another datacenter (for datacenter consolidation projects), or in any hosted cloud. Application portability fits into every enterprise’s strategy of orchestrated provisioning into public, private, or hybrid clouds. Applications can also easily move out of one vendor’s public cloud to another or back to on-premise, which helps to prevent vendor lock-in.

Bringing Simplicity to Windows Server Modernization
AppZero brings simplicity to Windows server modernization via software that automates the migration and deployment of server applications to in-house datacenters as well as private, public, and hybrid clouds. AppZero software provides a fast, flexible way to move server applications to a cloud or datacenter, without code change.

Taking an automated approach to moving Windows Server applications, the company creates application images rather than server or machine images. AppZero software encapsulates an application and its dependencies in a container, without a virtual machine.

AppZero’s application migration automates extraction and movement of server-side applications in a fraction of the time required by other approaches – with no change to the application. AppZero holds 3 patents with more pending.

The following links provide more details about AppZero’s products:
appzero
moving-enterprise-apps-and-clouds

Meet the Mastermind

Nigel Stokes, CEO – Nigel is a software entrepreneur and venture investor. He founded and recapitalized AppZero Software in 2010. Under his leadership as CEO, the company is growing profitably at over 100% per annum. Nigel was previously CEO and co-founder of DataMirror, a real-time data integration company. DataMirror was publicly listed for 12 years and was sold in 2007 for $170M to the Information Management division of IBM.

Nigel also co-founded, and was President of, Nidak. Nidak ranked as the eleventh fastest growing company in Canada and was purchased by SHL Systemhouse.

As a venture investor, Stokes has funded a range of software and technology companies, including HubHead/NRX AssetHub, CloudPhysics, Concurrent, LiveQos, Thalmic Labs, Nymi, Push Strength, Linkett, Wellcoin, and Edsby. In addition, Stokes manages the MindAngler Private Equity fund focused on software and technology enterprises and has served on the Board of private and public technology companies.