As part of the Real World Windows Azure series, we talked to Paddy Srinivasan, CEO at Cumulux, about ManageAxis, the company’s monitoring, management, and deployment solution for customers who use the Windows Azure platform for delivering cloud-based applications.

MSDN: Tell us about Cumulux and the services you offer.

Srinivasan: Cumulux is a leading provider of cloud-computing products and services to Fortune 100 enterprises and major independent software vendors. Cumulux is led by Microsoft and industry veterans and was recently named one of the top 150 cloud-computing companies by the Cloud Computing Journal.  Our newest product, ManageAxis, enables robust monitoring, management, and compliance of enterprise-class applications that run on the Windows Azure platform.

MSDN: What are the biggest challenges that ManageAxis is solving for Windows Azure customers?

Srinivasan: Businesses that are developing and deploying cloud applications on the Windows Azure platform face several challenges:  

• Management and governance-Cloud applications have to be managed efficiently and proactively to control costs. Tight policy-based governance controls over who has access to cloud assets and periodic and on-demand logging and reporting are essential for managing mission-critical cloud deployments.
• Operational visibility and compliance-Operational and compliance regulations mean that businesses need to monitor and track critical application metrics like performance, security, and geo-location of services. However, many cloud-based applications are black boxes that provide little visibility into performance or other operational metrics.
• Application life-cycle management-Businesses that adopt the Windows Azure platform need to manage the application life cycle, including managing multiple versions and automating development, testing, and staging configurations for their cloud-based applications.

MSDN: Can you describe how ManageAxis addresses the monitoring, management, and application life-cycle needs of customers using Windows Azure?

Srinivasan: ManageAxis addresses these challenges through the following functionalities:

• Monitoring-ManageAxis helps customers monitor application performance, storage, and transaction metrics; monitor business key performance indicators (KPIs), service level agreements, and compliance metrics; and monitor operational costs of the application on Windows Azure.
• Management-ManageAxis enables customers to establish and implement policies for dynamic scaling based on forecasted peak loads or unplanned bursts in traffic. It also gives them the ability to create roles-based compliance workflows and provides reporting on critical business and performance KPIs.
• Deployment and application life-cycle management-Through ManageAxis, customers can manage multiple deployment configurations through the application life cycle and support rapid deployment with single-click cloning of solution topologies. They also gain roles-based access to manage the deployed version of the application.

MSDN: What makes your solution unique?

Srinivasan: ManageAxis is the first-of-its-kind management, compliance, and deployment solution for Windows Azure. As customers look to Windows Azure as a viable part of their architecture and technology road map and make plans to deploy cloud-based applications, ManageAxis fills that critical need to help customers gain operational visibility and granular application control. As a result, customers are assured operational excellence and optimum performance.

MSDN: What kinds of benefits are you realizing with Windows Azure?

Srinivasan: Windows Azure provides us with a great platform that enables visibility into application and performance metrics and helps us to manage the applications on our customers’ behalves. We currently consume about 10,000 Windows Azure compute hours to host the various applications that we manage for our customers. By using ManageAxis, we are seeing a 40 percent reduction in the operational costs by adjusting the instances according to the performance and application metrics. Additionally, we are saving significant support time and costs by using ManageAxis for monitoring, alerting, and logging, rather than having our support team perform the same actions.

To read more Windows Azure customer success stories, visit:  www.windowsazure.com/evidence

Visit Cumulux at: www.cumulux.com/products/manageaxis/