Businesses investigating cloud computing learned how to move a mission-critical enterprise application from a datacenter to a cloud computing environment or between clouds, such as Amazon EC2 or GoGrid, at the Virtualization & Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in New York City. AppZero President and CEO Greg O'Connor addressed server application and portability as a means to ease the transition to cloud computing on Tues., March 31 at the Roosevelt Hotel.

O'Connor demonstrated moving a three-tier application from a datacenter to a public cloud, and then to another cloud provider with the click of a mouse. In addition, O'Connor outlined how enterprises and ISVs can create Virtual Application Appliances (VAAs), an approach to packaging server applications with zero operating system, for delivery to any virtual environment. VAAs enable server applications such as web servers, databases and middleware to run on any cloud, allowing these scalable resources to be used on a pay-per-use basis, without cloud lock-in.

According to AppZero's O'Connor, "Most IT departments are currently in the experimentation phase and want to see what is involved in moving an application to the cloud. For cloud computing to succeed, the industry needs to show how the applications that run our businesses today can be easily moved anywhere for any reason, whether for better pricing or service terms, or the failure of a cloud provider."

AppZero is offering a free download of AppZero beta for Windows 2003 & 2008 Server at http://www.appzero.com/content/download.