You probably know Gigaom and its expertise on, among other things, cloud. You probably know David Linthicum and Janakiram MSV as renowned cloud experts, and you may know myself from work we’ve done with Gigaom and Interworks as an up and coming vendor. Given that, you are most likely to be interested in our webinar (free at February 4th, 7p.m. CET)  titled “Mastering the business side of SaaS and IaaS“. Still, you may be wondering what does the “business side of SaaS and IaaS” is about, so i’m going to give some hints as to what we mean by that and what you can expect to listen to in our webinar.

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are proliferating. That’s no news for those who keep up with this domain, and as David Linthicum and Jo Maitland put it in their cloud and data third-quarter 2013 analysis and outlook , “CMP is the new buzzword applied to a group of technologies that take different approaches to managing numerous cloud-based systems and typically leverage multicloud types of architectures”. David and Jo predict a steady growth for CMPs in the foreseeable future, as they help dealing with the rising complexity of the cloud.

What are CMPs and what are they good for? Simply put, they are applications that help users apply a mix-and-match strategy to their utilization of different cloud solutions and deal with the ensuing complexity. As there is a multitude of offerings both for public and private cloud platforms, cloud users want to be able to have maximum flexibility in terms of what they use and when they use it, so that all combinations are possible depending on what makes sense for a particular situation or workload. Again, this should all be familiar to people that keep up with Gigaom, having read Paul Miller’s Sector RoadMap for Multicloud management in 2013.

As we’re still in the early days of CMPs however, most of them are focusing their efforts on the technical aspect – and that’s no surprise either. Being able to juggle among all these possible options is no easy feat, and requires considerable effort in and by itself. So while these CMP solutions make sure that the user experience is as seamless as one can expect, it’s interesting to note that they are mostly addressed to technical users: the ones that are in charge of making sure everything is working as it should, provisioned and ready to go in order to run whatever workloads the business has for them.

Our focus is going to be on a special class of CMPs that are there in order to enable service and application providers alike to scale up their business using cloud infrastructure. As such, they are more concerned with things like application bundling and customer relationship management rather than provisiong and cloud-balancing acts (although they obviously rely on them).

We believe this approach and this webinar have the potential to appeal to a broader, if not somewhat overlapping, audience. One that is not necessarily familiar with hypervisors or the latest version of OpenStack’s API, but knows the potential of the cloud and is looking for ways to leverage it for their business. If this sounds like you, be sure to join us tomorrow.

And if you missed it, here’s the webcast: