On Tuesday, the Boston-based company is launching a preview of AppGuru which aims to help IT  deal with the burgeoning bring-your-own-application (BYOA) craze which forces admins to deal with cloud-delivered personal applications that employees use at work but may not be officially sanctioned.

AppGuru promises a central console for managing multiple apps; an easy way to create, import or move users which works with Active Directory if it’s installed; and tools for managing licenses. It also vows to provide an easy way to set policy management and granular controls as needed. That’s a mighty tall order.

Michael Simon, CEO of LogMeI

Michael Simon, CEO of the Boston-based company, said LogMeIn gets invaluable perspective from both the consumer and the IT side of the BYOA divide.

“We don’t just have heavily used applications — with 55 million users — but we get visibility from consumer and IT perspectives,” Simon said.

AppGuru will manage LogMeIn’s web conferencing and collaboration application; Joinme screen sharing and Cubby, a Dropbox alternative for businesses, as well as Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, he said.

Simon said small and medium sized businesses are the company’s sweet spot but it has some very large enterprise accounts as well. Last quarter, for example, it announced a seven-figure deal with Hewlett-Packard, for LogMeIn Rescue, the company’s’ remote support offering.

Simon did not disclose pricing but said AppGuru should be commercially available this fall.

LogMeIn may have the chops to attack both the consumer and admin side of the equation, but it also faces formidable competition on the file-sync-and-share side of its business. Dropbox, the consumer champ, is gearing up Dropbox for Business while Google and Microsoft are pushing their respective application and storage tandems; and other competitors include Accellion, Egnyte and OwnCloud. They all claim to combine Dropbox-like simplicity with enterprise management perks.

That’s probably why LogMeIn is adding enterprise perks that go beyond file storage and sync. The IT issues that arise from BYOD and BYOA will be a hot topic at GigaOM’s Structure Europe event in September.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

But now that AWS is seeking credibility as a for-real platform for enterprise applications — a recurring theme at November’s inaugural AWS: Reinvent conference — should it offer a similar challenge for enterprise?

The suggestion was posed on Twitter by IT specialist Jeff Schneider, CEO of MomentumSI. 

Shouldn't #AWS kill their startup challenge and launch an enterprise challenge (if they were serious)?—
Jeff Schneider (@jeffrschneider) January 16, 2013

Over the past year, AWS has launched a series of higher level services and partnerships with such enterprise software stalwarts as SAP. If you so desire, you could run your Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server and even SAP Hana database on AWS although for now, as Capgemini CTO Joe Coyle has pointed out, licensing policies by those enterprise players pretty much nukes their ability to compete there.

#AWS prize for nastiest ERP implementation on cloud—
Jeff Schneider (@jeffrschneider) January 16, 2013

If AWS can encourage corporate execs to promote a contest for their in-house developers to build prototype mission-critical applications in AWS, an enterprise cloud push could accelerate. At GigaOM‘s Structure: Europe conference in October,  Amazon CTO Werner Vogels insisted that these enterprise apps are already taking off in AWS. Others disagree — maintaining that deployment of mission-critical applications in a public cloud is still a very dubious proposition especially in financial services and other regulated industries.

Some say this reluctance stems more from fear, uncertainty and doubt than from real issues with Amazon’s services. CIOs worry that AWS snafus in the consumer arena could impact their corporate services as well, although experts say well-architected IT services across AWS availability zones and regions mitigate that risk.

Then there’s the ingrained fear of change. ”IT people worry they’ll lose their jobs because of cloud,” said Greg Shields, senior partner and principal technologist for Concentrated Technology, an IT consultancy. “I tell them, ‘you will lose your job because of cloud but remember, there’s a legion of former punch-card feeder people out there who are still working. It’s just that they changed. Cloud won’t make you lose your income, you’ll just be doing something different. You may do higher order architecting and thinking about what services make sense in the cloud and how to construct them to make them efficient and secure.’”

So, GigaOM readers, what do you think? Does Amazon need an Enterprise Challenge? Please use comments to weigh in.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user tommistock

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Metered IT: the path to utility computing
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud and data first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• A near-term outlook for big data

Viewing the adoption of cloud services outside his family though, Rangaswami noted the similar situation in the at large. We as a society rely so heavily on services delivered via the internet, often without thinking about it, that “we recognize the cloud today more by its absence.”

This is important stuff, even beyond what it means for the way companies do business. Health care, government inefficiency, climate change, water shortage — to solve these, we’re going to need open data, collaboration and everything the cloud enables. They are “a new paradigm of problems that are going to need a new paradigm of tools,” Rangaswami said. “The corporate equivalent is just a subset of what we face in life in general.”

That being said, Rangaswami noted that what happens within corporations does matter because they’re still engines of innovation and they hold a lot of valuable data. At the very least, companies such as Salesforce.com can try to encourage a change in corporate behavior that might bring about the real promise of technology movements such as big data. “Part of the ‘big’ is in the shareability — what gets shared,” he said, and it will be interesting to see how much companies are willing to share.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to Make Cloud Computing Greener
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• A near-term outlook for big data

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012
• The promise of software-defined networking

Thanks to virtualization, he explained, applications are insulated from the infrastructure and “you can truly attack [server management] in a way you couldn’t have in the past.” But, he added, there’s a catch: While hosting multiple applications on the same server and spinning virtual servers up and down via software saved companies money, they wanted more. The advent of cloud computing showed companies what’s possible when you can dynamically move workloads and, indeed, whole VMs around a set of resources as policies might demand.

And that, Strong said, requires turning the black art of networking into a simple, automated function that even laypeople can handle. More importantly, you have to make it “application-centric rather than device-centric,” so that networking, compute and storage react in accordance with what applications want rather than serving as limiters on what an application can do. “All people truly care about is their apps at the end of the day,” he said.

However, as most IT professionals are aware, we haven’t yet reached this nirvana of intelligent software managing dumb hardware all with the application’s needs in mind. Strong’s colleague, VMware CTO for EMEA Joe Baguley explained that although VMware has shipped enough licenses for its vSwitch product to make it the world’s third-largest switch vendor (without ever having shipped a piece of hardware), there still are plenty of obstacles to be overcome. Some of them, of course, are cultural: Baguley noted a recent discussion with a CIO who wasn’t aware he could run a heterogeneous server architecture underneath his VMware hypervisor.

But that shouldn’t be too discouraging, Baguley said, because the change will happen. You can see the evidence, such as a fewer number of ASICs are being developed for networking gear, and the excitement around products such as new VMware property Nicira. Everything that’s currently being done in hardware will eventually be done in software, he said: “You only have to look at compute and storage to know that’s true.”

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• How fourth-quarter 2012 will affect IT spending in 2013
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise

Javier Perez-Griffo

Besol actually launched in 2009 as a consulting firm for supercomputer and other large-system deployments, but soon realized there was a good business in helping people manage their cloud resources. As the company began working on more and more cloud computing deployments, Founder and CTO Javier Pérez-Griffo said he noticed a distinct lack of management resources compared with what he was used to with supercomputing systems. In those deployments, a single sysadmin could configure and manage many computers using tools such as Chef, but there was nothing comparable for these nascent clouds.

So, in mid-2010, Pérez-Griffo decided to stop doing consulting and start building Tapp. Now, he has a Software-as-a-Service platform for letting users configure, deploy, manage and monitor cloud resources across nine different clouds including Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, GoGrid, Joyent and IBM. All told, Tapp covers about 90 percent of the cloud-user market by supporting the clouds it does, and it can support infrastructure running VMware vCloud Director, OpenStack and CloudStack.

Monitoring in Tapp

Pérez-Griffo knows that winning customers away from companies such as RightScale and enStratus won’t be easy, but he thinks Tapp’s focus on making cloud simple for smaller companies is a big distinction from those companies’ more enterprise-focused offerings. With Tapp, he said, “You don’t have to know the terminology between Amazon, Joyent, GoGrid” — configuring a DNS server, for example, is completely independent of any particular service provider.

Tapp is also designed for reliability. “We have infrastructure deployed all over the cloud,” Perez-Griffo explained, citing the four clouds across multiple geographies upon which Tapp is built. The company doesn’t want its service to go down if a single cloud goes down, he said, so everything is redundant across its global footprint.

Interestingly, however, Besol isn’t content with Tapp being a platform just for European users to manage their clouds. In fact, CEO Hector Rodriguez told me, a major focus will be North America and its roughly 60 percent share of the cloud computing market. The company will start pursuing that more aggressively via channel partnerships in mid-2013, he said, while it builds up experience white-labeling cloud-management platforms for European telcos in the meantime.

Outside of the United States, telcos are often looked upon more favorably as cloud providers, but they often lack the tools needed to deliver user-friendly products. Rodriguez figures scale is the only real difference between managing clouds for them and small enterprises, so if Tapp works for the former it certainly should work for the latter.

Tapp is one of five finalists in our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition, which will take place on October 16th in Amsterdam. More information can be found here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Understanding and managing the cost of the cloud
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses

We’ll discuss many of the finer points of European cloud computing and web infrastructure at our Structure: Europe event Oct. 16 and 17 in Amsterdam, both business and technological. To whet your appetite, though, here are seven reasons why Europe is a lot more important than many people might think.

1. Clean, innovative energy

Northern Europe is turning out to be a testing ground for some of the most-innovative data center designs around thanks to its cool temperatures and abundant supply of renewable energy. Most notably, there’s Google’s seawater-cooled facility in Finland, and Facebook’s hydropowered plant in Sweden. Iceland is popular too, hosting Verne Global’s 100-percent renewable converted NATO hangar, and home to GreenQloud — a cloud provider running wholly within Verne Global’s facility and another all-clean data center by Thor Datacenter.

2. Eastern Europe’s talent pool

Eastern Europe has become an important geography for the IT world in general, boasting a glut of programmers, software engineers and other workers with skills that today’s companies really need. Not only is the region a hotbed for outsourcing, but it’s also the home to a growing number entrepreneurs doing innovative cloud and big data startups. Among them is Nginx, the popular web server created and since commercialized by Moscow resident Igor Sysoev .

3. London’s financial center

There are probably many reasons Dublin, Ireland, is emerging as a data center hotspot — including acting as the European homebase for Amazon Web Services’ and Microsoft’s cloud businesses — and one of them is almost certainly to be as close as possible to London without having to deal with that city’s severe power shortage. But London is an important market, especially when it comes to the financial world, an industry that spends billions on IT each year and that cloud computing providers want desperately to tap into.

4. CERN

One really needn’t say more than “Tim Berners-Lee” when describing CERN’s influence on cloud computing, because the cloud as we know it wouldn’t be possible without the web. But CERN also created a little thing called the Large Hadron Collider, which aside from discovering the Higgs boson, is the impetus of possibly the world’s most-impressive research network — spanning dozens of countries and supercomputers worldwide and generating around a petabyte of data per second. CERN is a big supporter of open source cloud efforts, including OpenStack, OpenNebula and the Helix Nebula research cloud in Europe.

5. OpenNebula

Led by Spanish computer scientist Ignacio Llorente, OpenNebula is a fairly popular open source cloud platform that rivals the work being done, largely in the United States, by the OpenStack and CloudStack projects. The project has been around since 2005, and claims a handful of large companies and European research institutions as users. Although it doesn’t have the big-name backers of the other two, it should remain viable for a long time because of its rather large user base.

6. One-third of Twitter’s firehose

DataSift, which is headquartered in Reading, England, is one of three companies (along with Gnip and Topsy) certified to resell the all the billions of data points streaming from Twitter every day. Social media, and Twitter especially, are a huge focus of corporate analytics efforts, and anyone that can capture and analyze all the world’s tweets is a kind of a big deal.

7. Individual rights

American cloud providers might not always agree with the European Union and its individual countries when it comes to data governance laws, but every country’s citizens should pay European governments some respect. Their regulations on data privacy — such as the prohibition on Facebook’s facial-recognition feature in Germany — help keep privacy in the forefront of companies’ minds as we release more and more personal info to web-based services.

Privacy image courtesy of Flickr user striatic.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• 9 Companies that Pushed the Infrastructure Discussion in 2010
• How to Make Cloud Computing Greener

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that Europe — for many reasons — is a much more fragmented (perhaps fractious) market than the US — or North America for that matter. Here’s why it would be hard for one infrastructure player — even Amazon — to dominate the European Cloud.

Data protection sitch remains fuzzy

If the European Commission is able to unify the varied data protection mandates across the 27 European (EU) countries as promised, public cloud adoption would probably speed up. Many companies are just deferring cloud decisions — or adopting private cloud that would let them keep their data local — because they don’t know how these laws would affect them now or in the future.

The EC cloud computing report, issued last week, does recommend that the various governments come up with a comprehensive plan on data protection, the goal being a “single set of rules at the EU level and a one-stop shop for enforcement.”

But, no actual convergence of those laws is expected till 2014 or 2015. In the mean time a technology advisor with the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) last week reiterated that companies remain accountable for handling customer data regardless of where it’s deployed. In a statement, Simon Rice said:

“As a business, you are responsible for keeping your data safe. You can outsource some of the processing of that data, as happens with cloud computing, but how that data is used and protected remains your responsibility.

It would be naïve for an organisation to take the attitude that these guidelines are too much effort to simply store some data in a different place. Where personal information is involved, the stakes are high and the ICO has already demonstrated it will act firmly against those who don’t meet data protection laws”

The perception is that if businesses outsource their data to a “certified” cloud provider (more on that in a second), they will be exempt from penalties if there is a breech. Rice seemed anxious to remind companies that the buck will still stop with them. (ZDnet and SCMagazine.UK have good roundups on this data protection dustup.)

The EU report also recommended that cloud providers be “certified” as trustworthy to handle consumer data. That prompted blowback from Liam Maxwell, the UK’s deputy CIO. He slammed the EC’s certification plan because it will restrict the number of cloud providers.

Maxwell called this a “tremendously retrograde step” that would “enable the oligopoly that has driven IT for many years to police the cloud,” according to itpro.co.uk.

Beyond data protection, Europe is still Europe

Even if data protection laws get totally sorted out, Europe remains fragmented by language, by currency (only 17 of the 27 European Union countries are in the Eurozone) and by culture. The relative homogeneity of the US was a factor that let Amazon get so big so fast, European IT pros said.

Amazon runs its European cloud operations out of Dublin and support for Amazon Web Services is available only in English (and Japanese) although a spokeswoman pointed out that the AWS site itself is available in German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese and Korean.  In addition, Amazon takes payment only in U.S. dollars.

While many Europeans speak English, that’s not a foregone conclusion. And it just seems polite for a company doing business in a region to take the local currency.

Tech culture differences

Steve Hughes, principal cloud evangelist for Colt Technology Services, a global IT provider based in London, said three factors contributed to Amazon’s success stateside.

First, Amazon was an Internet-only company that was able to exploit its scale in a one market (e-commerce) to another (public cloud infrastructure). Second, the US has a large  developer and early adopter market that flocked to Amazon’s easy-to-spin-up compute instances. And third, Amazon faced tech competitors that were more concerned with protecting existing revenue streams than jumping into the cloud. It is still riding that first-to-market advantage.

“That combination of factors coming together at the same time doesn’t really exist in Europe,” Hughes said.

Still some in the market expect that a few key IaaS players will emerge over time. “There will probably be consolidation because of sheer economics,” said Carl Theobald, CEO of Avangate, an Amsterdam-based provider of e-commerce payment and transactional services. There will be a few big players that provide a higher level of service at scale — there won’t be hundreds but there won’t be just one, he said.

Nationalism is not dead

There’s also a healthy dose of protectionism both in local governments and the national telcos that could  work against an outside power like Amazon encroaching on their turf. Both Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom have lobbied for national clouds, for example, arguing that European countries need to protect citizens’ data from subpoenas or seizure under the 9/11-inspired  U.S. Patriot Act. If customer information resides in a data center run by a US cloud provider like Amazon, Microsoft or Google, the thinking is that those companies would have to turn it over to US authorities.

Some European cloud and hosting vendors actually advertise their non-compliance with the U.S. Patriot Act.

Given all these forces at work, it will be hard for any one player to achieve Amazon-like cloud status in Europe. Still, after all this several sources I talked to  said if any company could beat the odds, it would be — you guessed it — Amazon itself.

The traction cloud computing gets in Europe and the hurdles to its adoption will be discussed at GigaOM’s Structure: Europe later this month.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979; Brussels photo courtesy of Flickr user DamienHR; Paris photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Iakov Kalinin

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• A near-term outlook for big data
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?

In many ways, this call to action, which also talks up green energy initiatives such as the use of a new  ”3-C microchip”, echoes the US’ cloud-first initiative, unveiled two years ago. The goal there was to push government agencies to adopt cloud computing to make government more responsive and efficient.

As expected, the EC report touches on the hot topic of the region’s diverse data protection laws, noting that this “patchwork of different rules”  across countries impedes broad cloud adoption. The commission will work with the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) and other bodies to develop EU-wide voluntary certification schemes in the area of cloud computing (including data protection) and establish a list of such schemes by 2014.

In a statement accompanying the news release , EC vice president Neelie Kroes – who is also the bloc’s digital agenda commissioner – said:

“Cloud computing is a game-changer for our economy. Without EU action, we will stay stuck in national fortresses and miss out on billions in economic gains. We must achieve critical mass and a single set of rules across Europe. We must tackle the perceived risks of cloud computing head-on.”

Four key action items of the plan published on Thursday are:

• Cutting through the jungle of technical standards so that cloud users get interoperability, data portability and reversibility; necessary standards should be identified by 2013;
• Support for EU-wide certification schemes for trustworthy cloud providers;
• Development of model ‘safe and fair’ contract terms for cloud computing contracts including Service Level Agreements;
• A European Cloud Partnership with member states and industry to harness the public sector’s buying power (20% of all IT spending) to shape the European cloud market, boost the chances for European cloud providers to grow to achieve a competitive scale, and deliver cheaper and better eGovernment.

The report’s GDP growth estimate differs from one that had leaked in advance. According to Thursday’s release, the EC expects a net gain of  €160 billion by 2020 — or a total gain of nearly €600 billion between 2015 and 2020″if the full EU cloud strategy is in place. Without that, economic gains would be two-thirds less.”

The earlier, leaked figure estimated the plan would generate additional €900 billion in additional GDP by 2020. And, according to the report, “in terms of overall job numbers, we expect to see 3.8 million jobs generated following full implementation of the strategy, against 1.3 million if the regulatory and other policy barriers are not tackled.”

As GigaOM has reported, many cloud providers want clarity around European data protection laws, but hold out little hope for fast action, given complexities of getting the 27 nations to agree on a single plan.  It looks like their concerns were well founded and many are proceeding under the assumption that they’ll need to have presence in each of the major countries to ensure that private personally identifying information (PII) of individuals stays local as mandated by the strictest of the European laws.

This topic of European cloud adoption and data protection laws will be discussed in more detail at GigaOM’s Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam in October.

The full EC report is here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• A near-term outlook for big data
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?