Salesforce says developers using its tools can build apps that tap into troves of legacy data from existing CRM customers.

Given these developments, and rumblings that public cloud king Amazon Web Services is gearing up its mobile development push, it looks like legacy cloud giants are crowding into a space pioneered by smaller, more focused providers of mobile back-end services. (GigaOM Pro analyst Janakiram MSV has a good take on choosing an MBaaS here — subscription required.)

Who needs an MBaaS?

Salesforce.com’s pitch is that, while there are tons of useful consumer mobile apps, enterprise apps to date are still lacking.  ”It’s hard to build mobile apps that don’t just look nice but are engaging and that comes down to data. They need to be connected into your work data,” said Adam Seligman, VP of developer relations at Salesforce.com. “You have to make it easy to build the apps, the client side stuff, but you also need those hooks into corporate data.”

The new mobile packs, which support three lightweight mobile frameworks — jQuery Mobile, Backbone.js and AngularJS — should help on the ease-of-development front.

Salesforce, which backs both Force.com and Heroku Platforms as a Service (PaaS), subscribes to the school of thought that a specialized Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) — from Parse, Kinvey, Kii or Stackmob — isn’t necessary. Those smaller competitors would no doubt argue that developers need to build applications that connect to myriad applications from many sources — not just those from one company.

Rackspace wraps up mobile stack in an easily deployable package

Rackspace already hosts “tons of mobile apps” but it wants to make it easier for developers and companies to deploy and run them, CTO John Engates said. So the San Antonio, Texas-based company wrapped up a mobile-focused technology stack as a sort of prepackaged cloud for that type of user.

“We want to streamline things. We put together a stack — including Linux, MySQL, PHP, Memcached, Varnish cache in a sort of blueprint that we can deploy consistently and quickly,” he said.

This backend runs in Rackspace’s public cloud infrastructure, but on cloud servers that are dedicated to that customer. “We’re basically running a single tenant infrastructure on a multi-tenant cloud,” Engates said. “Heroku is a multi-tenant platform that lives on Amazon, a multi-tenant infrastructure cloud. We’re trying to build a single-tenant platform atop a public cloud so you can build your own deployment and spec and scale it for what you need.”

Rackspace CTO John Engates

The entire stack is open source and developers can use their SDKs of choice to develop for any mobile device. Rackspace has also signed up some partners to work with its stack: FeedHenry, New Relic, Sencha, SOASTA, StackMob and Trigger.io.

“The idea there is you use our infrastructure but then SOASTA can test your application from many perspectives — not just Rackspace — and throw a load up there to make sure it scales before you deploy it,” Engates said.

Bring on the consolidation

As more of these bigger, broader “cloud” companies add mobile development and hosting capabilities, it may be time for consolidation in the MBaaS business to kick off for real.

Forrester senior analyst Michael Facemire said consolidation in the MBaaS space, which started to happen last year with Apigee’s acquisition of UserGrid, a pure-play MBaaS and Appcelerator’s buy of CocoaFish, will likely heat up now that these bigger players finally see how important mobile developers are to the future of their overall businesses.

And, it will be extremely interesting to see what Google has up its sleeve vis-a-vis Google App Engine (GAE). Oracle, a power among enterprise applications, will be another company to watch.

This story was updated at 7:50 a.m. PST with analyst comment

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SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos

mPulse promises to give developers and their companies a real-time glimpse into how their application is actually working in the field. A spinning globe dashboard shows all connections in real-time and users can drill down to the household level to see what device is running the application and how it’s performing. Latency issues, for example, will show up.

“Web and mobile apps have different useability issues — things like the placement of buttons really matter in mobile — so we give a far higher level of intelligence about how the apps are used,” Lounibos said.

Up till now, Mountain View, CA-based SOASTA has been known for helping companies make sure their web sites can handle big loads — the video feeds from  the London Olympics and the the Mars Rover landing are two examples. Now it’s bulking up its ability to load test mobile applications as they’re being used in real time.

mPulse features include real-time activity analytics, data visualization, role-based alerting, the company said. SOASTA was already working with LogNormal on the product when they decided a deal was in order.

One-year-old LogNormal was founded by Buddy Brewer and Philip Tellis who helped create Boomerang, a popular open source real user measurement (RUM) tool.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user  Cienpies Design

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SOASTA tests the traffic load applications can handle by generating cloud-computing-based resources that mimic the traffic generated by potentially millions of simultaneous real-world users. The company also recently tested London2012.com, the official Olympics web site that organizers predict will have to handle more than a billion visits over the course of this year’s event.

According to an e-mail explanation sent to me by NASA and SOASTA, here’s how the two groups put Curiosity’s streaming infrastructure, which is hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud, through its paces:

• They built a test infrastructure comprised of a single origin server (a Mac Pro housed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) serving four bitrates (250, 500, 750 and 1,000) to a single Flash Media Server. Output was cached by a single “tier 1″ Nginx server, fronted by 40 “tier 2″ load-balanced Nginx servers running on Amazon EC2.
• SOASTA generated load from six Amazon EC2 regions across the world, generating more than 25 Gbps of traffic and pounding the application for nearly 40 minutes.
• After 20 minutes, they terminated 10 instances (see Arrow 1 on the chart) to see if their stack and Amazon’s cloud could handle the failure. This temporarily reduced the amount of traffic the system could handle, but Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer service had the failed instances back up and handling 25 Gbps in about 5 minutes.
• When the team terminated 20 instances (see Arrow 3), the remaining servers’ traffic-handling rate dropped to 12 Gbps and servers started showing signs of being overloaded. Once again, Elastic Load Balancer brought the instances back up (see Arrow 4) and the traffic rate returned to its initial 25 Gbps.
• All told, SOASTA’s load-testing servers downloaded 68TB of video (see Arrow 2) from NASA’s cache during the nearly 40-minute test.

In the end, the team concluded:

Load on the primary FMS server and the tier 1 cache remained very low for the entirety of the test; we should have no problem running dozens of stacks during the live event. Anecdotal evaluation of the NASA live stream during testing showed no buffering or bitrate drops.

We are confident that the results of this test suggest that an aggregate of these stacks will be able to deliver the required streaming delivery for the Curiosity landing event.

Overall cost and flexibility benefits aside, the ability to test the effectiveness of an application’s infrastructure relatively easily and inexpensively is turning out to be one of the big benefits of cloud computing. NASA’s Curiosity test is just the latest example of this. Video-rental giant Netflix has built an army of simian-named services (such as Chaos Monkey) that simulate everything from the failure of a single server to the failure of an Availability Zone in Amazon’s cloud, where Netflix runs almost all of its IT operations.

Tune in tonight at 10:31 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time to see if NASA’s Curiosity streaming infrastructure really can hold up.

Update: Amazon Web Services has posted a blog detailing NASA’s production architecture for the Curiosity live stream. You can read the details there, but here’s a diagram of the architecture that shows how the test architecture scaled:

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While SOASTA has been busy rolling out new features, talking about high-profile customers and expanding beyond its Amazon EC2 roots, a slew of companies have built up behind it. Among them are Apica, BlazeMeter, BrowserMob, LoadStorm, Mu Dynamics, Neotys and SmartBear (LoadUI). There should be plenty of business to go around, as application development has spiked with new platforms such as mobile phones, tablets and social-media sites. Given the ubiquity of on-demand testing services, there’s little excuse for developers with an eye on mass adoption to be caught off guard by application issues in the face of high traffic.

SOASTA still appears to be the gold standard, though, claiming lots of customers (many of them household names) and having raised more than $30 million overall. The Entrepreneurs’ Fund, led this latest round, with participation from prior investors Canaan Partners, Formative Ventures, and Pelion Venture Partners.

When asked about the spate of competitors, SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos told GigaOM via email:

SOASTA on the other hand … changed the web and mobile test market by introducing the FIRST cloud based Application test platform back in 2008. … CloudTest, which is installed at over 3,000 companies worldwide, has changed the web and mobile test market forever by reducing the time to test from (days into minutes), scale of test from (hundreds to millions of virtual users), and making it affordable to test by turning a manual process into an automated process reducing cost for corporations (from [multiple] millions into a SaaS-based solution costing hundreds of dollars per test). SOASTA customers include Verizon, Netflix, Target, and the Gilt Groupe have access to nearly 300,000 cloud-based test servers worldwide.

Image courtesy of Flickr user dailylifeofmojo.

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To quote Nielsen’s release:

“In the last quarter of 2009, simultaneous use of the Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month, up 35 percent from the previous quarter. Nearly 60 percent of [U.S.] TV viewers now use the Internet once a month while also watching TV.”

For companies using broadcast programs or television advertising to promote their online campaigns to massive TV audiences, this shift in audience behavior translates into a significant opportunity. Novel online campaigns increasingly seek to convert passive viewers of television into active consumers of online content, creating new opportunities to generate revenue.

But as I discuss in my latest article for GigaOM Pro, a single, well-placed TV spot could rapidly direct millions of visitors to a site, creating traffic spikes with which traditional infrastructure would struggle to cope — a potential headache for those tasked with keeping those sites online and responsive, but a near-perfect use case for the ‘elastic’ nature of cloud computing.

Cloud computing — which gets a lot of attention over at GigaOM (and is the focus of the upcoming Structure conference) — offers the means to test the responsiveness of sites to spikes in demand, and to cost-effectively scale in order to cope.

Big media events don’t come along every day, and their audiences tend to be large, committed and engaged: perfect for well-targeted advertising. Take the case of Denny’s Super Bowl campaign earlier this year.  The 30-second spot offered all Americans a free breakfast and directed viewers to a related URL. With more than 100 million viewers, the campaign drove 59 million hits during Super Bowl Sunday alone.

This was Denny’s second attempt to persuade a significant proportion of the Super Bowl’s huge TV audience to engage with its brand, and the company had struggled to cope with unprecedented traffic the previous year. For its 2010 campaign, the company worked with cloud-based performance testing company SOASTA to test and adequately prepare its site ahead of the big day.

And Denny’s isn’t alone. From Channel 4 (one of five nationally available terrestrial channels in the UK) to Bloom Energy, broadcasters and advertisers are turning to cloud computing resources to scale up their sites for spikes in demand.

Tom Lounibos, president and CEO of SOASTA, suggests that as much as 70 percent of the public-facing marketing campaigns he works with are being served off cloud infrastructure, a number he reckons will only grow. “Performance testing,” Lounibos claims, “is the killer app for the cloud.”

“Event-dependent, time-sensitive campaigns,” he continues, “are perfect for deployment in the cloud,” especially where they employ a significant social media component or display clear spikes in demand.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kaptain Kobold.

Maybe it’s because the iMac is so tricky to find that the story got picked up so quickly over the weekend, and by so many different outlets, but readers were quick to point out that the “news” of a possible $899 iMac was in fact not news at all, since the model has been available at that price point since 2006. In fact, rather than being the deal of the century, the iMac priced at $899 is actually probably one of the least appealing value propositions available from Apple, unless you want an old white plastic model to keep sealed in a box in the hopes that it will become a priceless collector’s item in 20 years time.

This story was picked up by everybody, including Gizmodo, MacRumors and Engadget (although Giz and Engadget have taken it off of their main site; Giz link leads to their Australian site), among many others, as such serving as yet another example of how susceptible Apple news reporting is to manipulation, even if the original “leak” was not intentional. At least MacRumors didn’t immediately try to backpedal to avoid embarrassment. Mistakes in print are not so easy to undo. Tech publications: Admit it when you screw up, instead of trying to go back in time and erase any evidence of a less-than-perfect track record.

This example also shows pretty clearly what we can do to reduce our susceptibility to manipulation. The answer? Take five seconds to fact-check before you hit the publish button. Ours is admittedly a fast-paced news cycle, but artificially and unnecessarily so. In fact, nothing we report has dire consequences, if you really think about it, so hanging on to a story in the interest of accuracy will better serve readers than publishing mistaken information at a break-neck pace.

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SOASTA CEO Tom Lounibos says he realized the need for new testing methods while running SaaS provider Dorado. “QA went from 3 to 16 testers because we needed to do so much scripting.” AJAX, SOAP and RESTful APIs had become increasingly difficult to test with open-source tools (just try testing Google Maps), while licensed software like Loadrunner costs too much, he said.

Generating traffic on demand is nothing new: Companies like Gomez and Keynote Systems have offered web stress-testing services for years. But SOASTA wants to offer an entire suite of tools for scripting tests, instrumenting servers, and analyzing problems.

Testing is inherently elastic. One minute, systems are idle; the next, they’re hammering a new application with thousands of transactions a second. “Software is only part of the cost,” said Lounibos. “You need hardware, a development environment, deployment, collection and analysis.” So Lounibos teamed up with OLAP veteran Ken Gardner (now SOASTA’s Executive Chairman) to create an entire test platform in the cloud, including device monitoring and post-test reporting.

The thing about the cloud is that it scales. SOASTA just finished a 100,000-user test for QTRAX using EC2 and is preparing for a million-user test soon. While tests currently have to be scheduled beforehand, the company plans to let developers schedule their own tests, Lounibos said. So we have to ask: Isn’t it dangerous to give testers the keys to what is, effectively, a huge denial-of-service system? And can a huge test eat up the resources of a cloud, making other cloud users suffer?

“We don’t want to overwhelm the cloud, or create the next generation of spam,” said Lounibos.

Still, the potential for mischief is huge, and with more and more “open clouds” emerging, regulation needs to go beyond just terms of service. Companies that run on-demand tools have an obligation to see that those tools aren’t abused. As Lounibos puts it, “It’s imperative for companies like ours to work together not to crash this thing.”

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Vogels said that Amazon built AWS for the company’s internal developers, and as such, didn’t feel the need to wrap services such as dashboards and testing offerings around it. And the company typically doesn’t announce new features for the AWS platform until they’re ready for use. But when it came to persistent storage, he pointed out, they started talking about it as soon as they had a beta, putting startups and other firms planning such a service on notice that Amazon would enter that market.

“We wanted to make sure people had a look at our roadmap,” Vogels said. “Our goal is to be very respectful and recognize the value of the ecosystem.”

Vogels didn’t offer any specific glimpses of Amazon’s roadmap, but he did say the firm listens to the demands of its customers when deciding which services to pursue. He said popular requests involve content delivery network services, backup, small file transfer, large file transfer and visual applications.

He also noted that many enterprises have “accidentally wandered” into the cloud for one-off projects and then stayed there. For those customers he points out that business processes using AWS can be compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley, and that Amazon does work with customers facing regulatory or industry mandates, such as Visa’s PCI requirements to protect cardholder data.

So while Vogels didn’t draw a map showing what AWS has in store for the future, startups planning additional services tied to AWS now have at least the outlines of the company’s plans. They can now follow that outline or chart their own course when it comes to navigating the cloud.

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