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The product is a platform for hosting connected devices, much like Electric Imp, ThingWorx, Carriots, Xively, Thingsquare and others. However, it’s a bit different in that the Ayla executives went to the major chip firms such as Broadcom and STMicroelectronics to ensure that software supporting the Ayla platform is embedded on the chips that Ayla customers would buy to add connectivity to their devices.

Thingsquare has similar promises and Electric Imp actually provides its own hardware to companies, so the Ayla devotion to the hardware side of things isn’t entirely new. It also has device discoverability, the ability to hook multiple devices on the Ayla cloud together in one application and other features aimed at making the end consumer experience easy.

But Ayla isn’t targeting the consumer. Instead, it’s hoping that large companies adopt the service to add connectivity to their own products. It might be a connected microwave that can report back to the manufacturer that a part is wearing out, or it might be a personal activity monitor built by an athletic clothing company.

The platform is already in use in China, where SINA, a media network that includes the Sina.com portal and Weibo.com, a microblogging network, is using Wi-Fi-based weather sensors hosted on Ayla’s network to create a personalized weather network for users. David Friedman (pictured above, on the left), the CEO of Ayla and a former executive at ZeroG Wireless, is a big believer in the connected future and shared data used to build unique services. Ayla is his answer to the problems that currently stand in the way of building those services.

It’s a vision several entrepreneurs have had, and one that VCs have generously funded. Ayla’s team could help it span the gaps between devices, networks and the cloud, but it’s still playing in a pretty frothy sector. Ayla’s founders include Adrian Caceres (pictured above, on the right), who worked at Amazon’s Lab126, where he was technical lead for the networking capabilities of the Amazon Kindle; Philip Chang, who previously helped establish a presence for ZeroG Wireless in China; Friedman; and Thomas Lee, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University who has helped create companies such as Matrix Semiconductor. Perhaps they will be the team that really nails this opportunity.

Updated: The article has been changed to reflect that Ayla has a partnership with Broadcom and STMicroelectronics, not Texas Instruments, as was originally reported.

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Google announced the new service on its Android Developers and Cloud Platform blogs, describing it as “a one-click deployable, complete mobile backend that allows you to reap the benefits of a cloud backend with none of the headaches. It provides a ready-to-deploy, general purpose cloud backend and a general purpose client-side framework for Android.”

Google’s new service is hardly the first on the market, though, and it’s nowhere near the broadest. The market for providing what some call “mobile backend as a service” has been growing in popularity over the past couple years as smartphone use has proliferated. The classic infrastructure-as-a-service and even platform-as-a-service clouds have been a godsend to many web and early mobile startups, but many mobile developers just want something even simpler, it appears.

Mobile Backend Starter joins the aforementioned Parse, as well as other offerings from startups such as Appcelerator, Kinvey, Flurry and StackMob. All of these services offer broader feature sets and support for numerous mobile platforms beyond Android. Google’s prevailing thinking seems to be, though, that if you’re developing apps for Android, there’s no better place to do it than with the company who created the operating system.

In fact, Google is just the latest of bigger, badder vendors getting into the MbaaS space: Rackspace and Salesforce.com did so earlier this year and, if Amazon Web Services job postings are to be believed, the king of public cloud is also eyeing entry into this space.

Technically, Google unveiled Mobile Backend Starter during a talk at Google I/O last month, but apparently word didn’t spread much beyond the walls of that room. David Chandler, one of the Google developers who gave the presentation, has collected a number of additional resources here, on his personal blog.

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Bensen is a veteran of the remote access and networking world, wo brings his experience building voice over IP and remote terminal access technologies to investing in internet of things companies. His believe is that between 500 and 5,000 companies will be created (of course not all will succeed) to take advantage of the opportunity, likening it to the networking boom of the nineties. Unlike that boom, however he sees the eventual standards for IoT coming not just from networking giants, but healthcare, insurance and other companies that have traditionally held themselves aloof from broad tech industry standards setting. At the end of the podcast he also shares his favorite use case for his own connected devices.

Download this episode

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Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: Woody Bensen, a general partner with Prism VentureWorks and a managing director of IoTWorks

• How big is the internet of things, and what kind of infrastructure does it need?
• We need systems integrators for building connected devices and services. But no one knows what features matter
• Securing the internet of things will happen at the gateway and needs a lightweight solution.
• Sharing use cases and swapping IFTTT recipes.

PREVIOUS IoT PODCASTS:

Podcast: How to design a connected device that isn’t a jerk, plus IoT’s recipe for success

Podcast: The history of the internet of things includes a Swedish hockey team and LEGOs

IoT Podcast: Where self-milking cows graze fields of data gold

Podcast: Power to the people — and all their connected devices

What you really need to know before buying connected devices

How the internet of things may make parents less worried but more neurotic

Shark Week for the internet of things

What the Internet of Things can learn from Minecraft and Lemmings

Podcast: How IBM uses chaos theory, data and the internet of things to fix traffic

Electric Imp aims to make the Internet of Things devilishly simple

When devices can talk, will they conspire against you?

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While helping users host applications on five public clouds was one of Appfog’s main selling points, “it’s also become increasingly resource-intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure,” AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. He referred users to the AppFog Console, which will enable them to clone their application onto new target infrastructure.

Carlson could not be reached for comment Monday morning, but, Generally speaking, PaaS adoption by business users has been sketchy at best. Many developers love PaaS because it makes development and testing very easy, but once the applications are built, many companies prefer to run them in-house (i.e., not on a public cloud). And, more specifically, there have been rumors  that AppFog was seeking investment or even a potential buyout.

AppFog tried to end-run that argument by allowing deployment on private clouds as well, but it’s unclear how well that effort has gone. There has also been angst among companies, including AppFog, that built their PaaS offerings atop the Cloud Foundry framework. That was true when Cloud Foundry resided under VMware, and remains true since it was spun off to Pivotal, which is now selling its own Cloud Foundry PaaS that competes with third-party options.

I’ve reached out to Carlson for comment and will update this story when he responds.

Update: Carlson would not comment on rationale for dropping Rackspace but did say that AppFog has hundreds of paying customers and that his goal is to “build a big company in a big space.” AppFog still supports Amazon Web Services in three regions — North America, Europe and Asia as well as HP’s cloud.

This story was updated at 7:25 a.m. PST with Carlson’s comment.

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So he and his CTO, Alvaro Everlet, spun out a new company to build a platform of software and infrastructure so others could connect devices without having to reinvent the same wheel they had invented so many times before. They called the startup Carriots, and it’s now in the middle of raising a first round of funding.

Like Electric Imp, Carriots, a Madrid-based company, wants to make it easy for people to build out services for connected devices. Electric Imp provides the cloud service as well as an SD card with built-in connectivity. Carriots provides the cloud service, essentially a platform as a service, or PaaS, for the internet of things.

Castillo explained that developers can build the physical product and then link it to a software-based service on the Carriots platform using a few lines of Groovy, a Java-based language. Carriots charges companies for the number of devices they connect to the platform, with the first 10 devices being free.

Carriots has 10 employees and plans to double in size this year, as well as open a U.S.-based office to support growing interest in connected devices and services here. As I see more and more startups eyeing the internet of things, providing some type of back-end platform helps open the field up to a variety of developers who might have an idea but less of a technical background. But I also wonder what devices will work with this type of model.

For example, a consumer-facing device that sells millions might rack up some huge bills, so the team might be better off building out its own infrastructure, especially if it wants to provide access to data via an API. For companies selling to businesses, or with fewer devices, such as Pantry, the startup I wrote about recently that’s building a connected, refrigerated vending machine, it may make more sense.

Of course, if Amazon Web Services has taught us anything, it’s that even large companies like Netflix can benefit from outsourcing their infrastructure if it’s not core to their value proposition. Perhaps the growth of platforms for the internet of things will produce similar examples even as it enables new businesses to come to the fore.

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In a blog post, Heroku’s Zeke Sikelianos said the platform-as-a-service oufit had been seeing great demand from the non-U.S. world, and its second region was now live as a public beta, following a private beta with customers such as Swedish television network TV4.

“Deploying our app closer to our users in Heroku’s Europe region gave us a 150ms improvement in web performance. Based on this win for our users, we’re moving all of our apps to the Europe region,” the post quoted TV4 CTO Per Åström as saying.

The European region, which runs out of Amazon’s Irish data center, comes with all the same features as the U.S. region. Over 60 add-ons are already available for the region, such as Heroku Postgres and ClearDB, and others are on their way. The company has introduced heroku fork to its command-line interface in order to ease the migration of apps from the U.S. region, by copying relevant data and configuration variables.

Data location

European data protection laws are more stringent than those in the U.S., so the two parties have set up a Safe Harbor program for American companies whose services involve the handling of EU citizens’ personal data. Heroku still isn’t part of that program, so technically it’s still not kosher to run services for EU citizens on the platform, even though it’s now using an EU data center.

“Heroku is not yet a registered participant in the Safe Harbor program,” the post read. “We’ve laid the groundwork for becoming Safe Harbor certified and expect to have it soon.

“The Europe region public beta is designed to let you build high-performance apps for European users. It does not currently address data residency or jurisdiction concerns. You should assume that some portions of your app and its data will be in, or pass through, data centers located in the U.S.”

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A report I wrote for GigaOM Pro in June 2010 (subscription req’d), entitled “Defining Internal Cloud Options: From Appistry to VMware,” seems like a good starting point for a private-cloud startup edition of “where are they now.” Ignoring the public companies on the list for the time being (with the exception of CA), here’s what has happened to the private companies and startups.

1. Abiquo: Abiquo has a new CEO, a tight partnership with NEC around selling to service providers and appears focused on the European market. The company raised about $14 million in 2010, but hasn’t really made a lot of noise stateside since then.
2. Appistry: Appistry made a huge shift in August 2011 and it now positions itself as a platform for running high-performance applications in areas such as life sciences, defense and financial services. Its biggest area of focus is genomics, where it is even developing new methods for analyzing genomes.
3. CA: CA bought a bunch of cloud startups in 2009 and 2010 — Cassatt, 3Tera, Oblicore and Nimsoft among them — but it has been essentially silent since then in terms of real innovation. Maybe these acquisitions are driving big business, but I was expecting a more-visionary strategy in terms of fusing them into a cohesive and forward-looking whole.
4. Cloud.com: Winner!!! Cloud.com had big-name users and workable technology, and it sold itself to Citrix for more than $200 million in 2011. It has since launched an open source competitor to OpenStack called Apache CloudStack and appears to be doing good business.
5. Elastra: Elastra is no more.
6. Enomaly: Enomaly’s products still technically exist, but Virtustream bought the company in 2011 with the primary goal of repurposing its intellectual property in the realm of cloud federation and gaining a toehold in China.
7. Eucalyptus Systems: If you ask CEO Marten Mickos, everything is great with Eucalyptus, and its whopping $55.5 million in venture capital (including a $30 million round in April 2012) and tens of thousands of downloads of its Amazon-compatible cloud softwware are proof. Ask anyone else and they’ll likely tell a different story.
8. GigaSpaces: GigaSpaces appears to be doing well enough, although it was around well before the term “private cloud.” It has always been much more about its in-memory data grid tech and apps that need dynamic scalability, although it does now offer a Platform-as-a-Service product that’s somewhat disconnected from the legacy business.
9. Joyent: Joyent has always been respected for its engineering chops, although rumors sometimes swirl about how much business the company — which has raised an incredible $115 million — is actually bringing in. Still, it continues to improve its public and private cloud offerings and has landed some big-name users.
10. Librato: Librato looks to have abandoned its resource-management product line to focus on measuring stuff — sensors, server use, whatever.  It wears that hat well, and Heroku is among its loyal users.
11. LongJump: In hindsight, LongJump’s business was not actually a great fit for that 2010 report, and its business appears about the same: you build apps in a user-friendly setting and they can run on LongJump’s infrastructure or your own.
12. Morphlabs: Morphlabs is the master of pivots, although it’s still hanging around and pushing out new products. Now an OpenStack-based cloud-software vendor, it released a new service-provider-focused platform called mCloud Osmium in February.
13. Nimbula: Nimbula, as noted above, is now part of Oracle in a move that is widely believed to be an “acquihire” situation, although neither company will comment on the details.
14. Platform Computing: IBM bought Platform Computing in October 2011 and appears to have refocused the company around its HPC roots. Not that that’s a bad thing — Platform was a $72 million company on its own in a niche market, and I’d guess IBM paid a fair price for it.
15. Virtustream: Another winner! Virtustream has been on fire since 2010 (actually buying up Enomaly) and looks to be the darling of the enterprise cloud space. It’s primarily a public cloud provider, but it has a strong private/hybrid cloud business that ties Virtustream back to customers’ data centers.
16. Voxel: Voxel, whose main business was a public cloud offering, got acquired for $30 million by managed hosting provider Internap in January 2012.

OpenStack is what happened to the private cloud market and forced so many acquisitions, pivots and even one closure. Users, investors and everyone, really, were waiting for some promise of cloud interoperability and portability (aka something other than Amazon, VMware or Microsoft) and OpenStack delivered it. Further, for the service provider community — which has arguably bolstered the sales of private cloud software since its inception — OpenStack provided a relatively engineering-free path to public cloud offerings (compared with building their own from scratch, that is) without fear of being at the mercy of a startup that might fold tomorrow and take its core technology with it.

I haven’t run the numbers, but I’d be willing to bet the majority of venture capital going toward “private cloud” in the past two years has gone to OpenStack-based startups. We’ve also seen nearly every large software vendor pin its cloud ambitions to OpenStack to some degree — Cisco, HP, IBM and Red Hat to name a few. Even Rackspace is now in the private cloud game thanks to OpenStack.

For buyers, a large, well-heeled and deep-pocketed community has to be more appealing than a disparate collection of startups all doing their own thing.

L to R: Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus, Chris Kemp of Nebula (an OpenStack startup) and Sameer Dholakia of Citrix at Structure 2012.
(c) Pinar Ozger

Who’s not doing OpenStack (at least in any meaningful way)? VMware, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services — all companies with their own intellectual property, huge user bases and lots of money to back their visions. They all also have strong public cloud connections (some, obviously, stronger than others).

The cloud startups from 2010 that are still arguably thriving today share similar characteristics. They’ve been big on engineering, won major customers early on and raised a lot of money to help them maintain through any tough times. All but Cloud.com, now part of Citrix, have a very prominent public cloud component, too — which appears critical for a truly seamless hybrid environment — but it has staked out its own claim as the anti-OpenStack.

All of the aforementioned companies are/were doing infrastructure as a service primarily, but we’re already seeing a similar thing happen in the platform-as-a-service space thanks to Cloud Foundry. Providers that weren’t part of that community are jumping on board, and it’s just a few established holdovers that look like they’ll be able to push forward without riding Cloud Foundry’s coattails.

Perhaps this is telling for how the future of anything at the infrastructure or platform layers is going to play out. You’re either really early and really good, or you wait for an open source project — OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Hadoop, Open Compute, OpenFlow, etc. — and try to build on that. There’s following fast, and there’s following smart.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Alexey Repka.

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The addition of “external committers” to the project could ease tensions brewing among some Cloud Foundry backers — companies that built their own PaaSes atop the Cloud Foundry framework.

But then again, the fact that Pivotal is now selling software/support could open new areas of contention with partners that may want to do the same thing. Such is the life of an open source project where coopetition is the rule of engagement.

As set forth in a new blog post, Cloud Foundry is going to add “full-time external committers” to the process. Governance and openness had been an ongoing issue with the PaaS project according to an exec with one Cloud Foundry vendor. “We just didn’t have any visibility into what was going on [inside the project],” he said.

He would like to see the whole effort turned over to a vendor-neutral foundation for management, as Rackspace did with OpenStack and IBM did with Eclipse. That didn’t happen here but the addition of outside committers is a step in the right direction and, to be fair, some folks in the OpenStack community complained that Rackspace took its sweet time to make its move.

Lucas Carlson, CEO of AppFog, another Cloud Foundry backer, said he’s seen other good signs from Cloud Foundry. He is thrilled, for example, that the code is back on a public Github repository. It had been removed some time ago. “We see it as a sign of a more open approach from the Cloud Foundry team,” he said.

Collaborators or competitors: a fine line

Some history: The worry initially was that Cloud Foundry, despite all the talk of open-source goodness and just plain openness, was too closely associated with one vendor:  VMware. Then, when VMware spun it off to a VMware-and-EMC-backed entity (Pivotal) there was more uncertainty about its future.

There was also concern that some of the Cloud Foundry players were going to take the work they’d done and fork the project altogether because of the lack of visibility into Cloud Foundry plans. Under this definition a “fork” — and yes, I’ll get hate mail on this — that could lead to the creation of several not-always-compatible versions of a project.

For some in the open source community, there is no such thing as a bad fork.But for mere mortals there is worry about an actual ecosystem divergence when many members of the same community start getting their updates from different places instead of relying on a central source, in this case Pivotal. To be fair, there is analogous concern that several versions of OpenStack backed by many vendors — some contributing back more than others — will lead to the same problem. At any rate, that’s the kind of angst Pivotal is trying to lay to rest.

In Thursday’s blog post, James Watters, head of product for Cloud Foundry, reiterated that the project will support multiple clouds, promising “open interfaces, support and continued development on AWS, OpenStack, vCloud and vSphere environments.”

And, he maintained, that the addition of outside committers was always a goal:

” … we are engaged with several organizations about putting dedicated resources on the extended engineering team –we believe this to be a very important step forward. The scale of these external investments is significant and a major milestone in our growth. The heart of Cloud Foundry, however, really comes from individual community contributions and users, so of course, we invite you to join us. All you need to do is send a pull-request.”

Going  orward it will be interesting to see what engineers from which companies will be added as committers. For now, the naysayers appear to be relieved at what Cloud Foundry has done.

Watters endorsed Cloud Foundry’s existing “corporate sponsored, Apache 2 licensed, pull request driven approach” as the right way to go. The outside committers will open up the process going forward, but he also left the door open to further changes. He wrote: “The massive growth of the community and ecosystem requires mediating a diverse set of needs and we will always be open to other governance models for the project in the future.”

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CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey

The goal is to make it easy for developers to develop what they want using CloudBees — taking advantage of its Jenkins-based continuous integration capabilities –  to deploy what they build where they want.

CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said his company focuses on the whole application life cycle, not just development, not just deployment. In October, the company announced a similar deal that lets its users deploy on Google App Engine.

“If you’re a GAE user you can subscribe to our services… it’ s not that we’re moving to Cloud Foundry as a company, it’s just that customers have freedom of choice. If you prefer GAE or Cloud Foundry to us for deployment, that’s fine,” he said.

CloudBees users wanting to deploy to Cloud foundry can sign up here. 

Here’s the thing about PaaS: Many developers love them because of the freedom and flexibility they offer when it comes to actual development. Moves like this one mean that deployment options for their finished code (if there is such a thing) are opening up as well.

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