Kaavo
Cross-Vendor Cloud Control

The first thing you should know about Kaavo is that it was founded by a former IT pro. The second thing is that its software, called Infrastructure and Middleware On Demand, is used to set up and manage IT resources in the public cloud.

Kaavo founder and CEO Jamal Mazhar is a Sun-certified J2EE architect and, among other experience, was head of component services for financial firm ING's U.S. division. Last month, Mazhar hired Shahzad Pervez, a former director of IT at ING and, before that, enterprise architect at PennMutual, as Kaavo's CTO.

In other words, Kaavo's management team speaks your language and feels your pain. "They're already in the same room I am" when discussing the IT requirements for cloud computing, says early adopter Sudhir Kulkarni, CTO of SellPoint, which creates online media for manufacturers of consumer products.

Founded last November, Kaavo developed its J2EE-based cloud management tool initially for Amazon's EC2 service. Kaavo's dashboard can be used by developers and IT administrators to launch EC2 server instances, grant and revoke permissions to users, transfer files, and perform other administrative tasks.

Kaavo is working on similar capabilities for the cloud computing services of FlexiScale and GoGrid. Once done, customers will be able to manage IT resources across those services from a single Kaavo dashboard. "We are vendor neutral," says Mazhar.

	Mazhar knows your pain

Kaavo's technology is in test mode, with a first release due in the next few months. Capabilities include configuration of JBoss, MySQL, and other software layers and server monitoring. Still in development are intelligent load management, software audits, patch management, runtime configuration management, and advanced notifications and alerts. Kaavo also is working on "one-click" encryption so data can be encrypted for storage on cloud servers.

SellPoint creates rich media content for customers such as Canon, Fuji, and Panasonic, then hosts it on Amazon EC2 for syndication to e-commerce Web sites. CTO Kulkarni uses Kaavo's technology to create, change, and administer server instances on EC2. "One of the limitations of EC2 is that the administrative interface is evolving," he says. Kaavo fills that gap.

Kaavo, a privately held company with about 20 employees, hasn't sought outside funding. That's a possibility in the months ahead, but Mazhar's priority now is getting the software out the door by December. He knows that the cloud computing market is moving fast and won't wait.

-- John Foley

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