platform-as-a-service

Opening up Software as a Service (SaaS)

In all the hype around Software as a Service (SaaS) as a way to bring down prices and drive value to the customer, one thing is conveniently overlooked: SaaS is the ultimate lock-in platform.

As Chris Keene, CEO of Wavemaker, suggests, however, SaaS may well succumb to the same forces that are driving software to open up:

Although SaaS development platforms like SalesForce and Coghead have gotten a lot of attention, this market has so far been remarkably closed and proprietary. The Platform as a Service leader, SalesForce, has both a draconian hosting policy (host your apps and data anywhere, as long as it's with us!) but also a proprietary language (who needs Java when you've got Apex!?).… Read more

Gold-plated support comes to Amazon Web Services

Looking to take on more demanding customers, Amazon Web Services on Thursday rolled out two paid-support plans that give customers access to its engineers to resolve glitches.

The company said it will offer two levels of support--gold and silver--for a fixed annual fee or a percentage of customers' total usage of its services. The support plans are available for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). For more details on the terms, click here.

Right now, Amazon offers pay-as-you-go pricing for its hosted services. Customers pay for how much they use … Read more

Before Salesforce.com-Google lovefest came Zoho dalliance

Only months before Saleforce.com and Google integrated their Web applications, Salesforce.com offered to buy Zoho, a direct competitor of Google Apps.

Sridhar Vembu, the CEO of Zoho parent company AdventNet, divulged that juicy nugget in a blog posting following the much-ballyhooed Google-Salesforce.com tie-up. Zoho makes Web-based productivity and business applications.

Vembu said that the proposed deal was never close to consummation, but it wasn't over the price tag.

He said that the Zoho and Salesforce.com business models are fundamentally at odds because Salesforce.com spends much more proportionately on marketing and sales. He also accused … Read more

Does 'platform as a service' mean developer lock-in?

As people get their heads around Google App Engine, they see some things they may not like. Namely, the dreaded "lock-in."

Tim O'Reilly dissected whether Google's App Engine is a lock-in play on Monday, and RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady hit the issue head-on with his excellent Q&A on what Google App Engine actually is.

Developers for years have been clamoring for more openness and standards. They are tenets of the open-source movement.

But as more application development moves to hosted platforms, does data and application portability get lost in "the cloud"? … Read more

Battle of developer ecosystems heads for the cloud

Right now, some may look like the online equivalent of a quaint corner store. But catalogs of online applications are the front lines of a brewing battle among platform-as-a-service providers.

Start-up Coghead on Tuesday plans to launch Coghead Gallery, an online store where people in small businesses can hunt for applications.

The applications, written with Coghead's visual-development tool, run on its hosted platform. The platform, built using Adobe Systems' Flex, runs on Amazon Web Services.

At the start, there will be about 30 partners listing their business applications. Coghead's software is aimed at small development shops or tech-savvy businesspeople. … Read more