RightScale Case Studies

RightScale Helps API Management Company Apigee Win New Customers and Increase Satisfaction

Business Overview

Apigee provides an innovative software solution for visibility and control of cloud computing services and APIs. Apigee technology is used to provide API management, and governance over an enterprise or a SaaS vendors APIs, providing comprehensive monitoring of the quality of the software services. Today, Apigee customers include over 50 leading enterprise, SaaS, and media companies, including MTV Networks, where Apigee optimizes the media giant's online content distribution.

Business Challenge

With many customers eager to take advantage of all the benefits of Apigee ServiceNet running on the cloud, the company found that the process to deploy their customers directly on a cloud infrastructure was time consuming and repetitive. Apigee needed an automated cloud-deployment system to ensure a quick and repeatable process for launching their cloud services. Moreover, some Apigee customers expressed concerns over the risk of getting locked into one cloud infrastructure and how this could affect their application and business.

RightScale Solution

To eliminate these concerns and to provide an automated, easy-to-use cloud management platform for its customers, Apigee chose RightScale to deliver ServiceNet. "At Apigee we've leveraged RightScale to help us provide customers with a ServiceNet offering via the cloud in addition to our existing hardware and software versions," states Chet Kapoor, CEO, Apigee.
RightScale's automation and best practices reduce the complexity of cloud computing, enabling Apigee and their customers to deploy applications in a matter of hours. With sophisticated "cloud-aware" server templates, it's easy to deploy, manage and dynamically scale on the fully-automated RightScale platform.

Because the RightScale platform makes it easy to move an application from one cloud to another, our customers' concerns about getting locked into one specific cloud have been alleviated.

Chet Kapoor, CEO, Apigee

A ServerTemplate starts with a RightImage, a simple base machine image that normally contains only the operating system, and then adds RightScripts, scripts that define the role and behavior of that particular server. RightScripts may run during the boot, operational, and shutdown phases of the server's lifecycle.

One key advantage of ServerTemplates lies in their ability to deploy cloud-ready servers. These servers know how to operate in the cloud – i.e. how to obtain an IP address, how to access and manage storage, how to submit monitoring data, and how to collaborate with other servers in a cloud deployment. Another advantage lies in their innovation beyond the "machine image" model, allowing you to more flexibly and quickly modify server configurations.

RightScale sets itself apart through the unique approach of managing complete deployments – comprising multiple servers and the connections between them. Within such deployments, each server can be pre-configured and controlled using a cloud-ready ServerTemplate, saving time and money with each deployment.

The RightScale Cloud Management Platform has removed the need for Apigee to manually build out their customer deployments on the cloud and it has dramatically accelerated Apigee's time to market. "RightScale has removed major roadblocks to getting Apigee's customers up on a cloud infrastructure, and it has dramatically accelerated Apigee's time to market," said Chet Kapoor, Apigee CEO.

"Since Apigee has been using RightScale as part of its solution, our customers' deployment time has gone from roughly a week to a day – a time savings of about 85 percent."

Another critical benefit Apigee has received because of using RightScale is the platform's cloud vendor-neutral functionality. The RightScale platform was built so that customers could painlessly move their application from one cloud to another.

Using RightScale, Apigee customers can select the best cloud infrastructure for their needs, migrate to a new one, or split deployments across multiple clouds – public or private – all from within the RightScale management platform. With new cloud providers emerging all the time, Apigee customers will be able to select the best cloud for their specific requirements, security or SLA mandates, geographic locations, usage patterns, or pricing to maximize performance, flexibility, and return on investment.

Apigee believes this RightScale capability has shortened their sales cycle by eliminating the lock-in worry held by technical decision-makers. "Using RightScale's technology has helped to alleviate any customers' concerns about getting locked into one specific cloud because the RightScale platform makes it easier to move their applications from one cloud to another."