The future of enterprise software: Bungee's in the cloud, for the cloud model
(Credit:
Bungee Labs)
Open source and SaaS dramatically change the way enterprises consume software. But today I heard this taken to the nth degree, with a shift in a company's revenue model, as well. Bungee Labs helps enterprises (of any size, but with a particular focus on the tens of thousands-strong SMB market) build rich Internet applications (RIAs) in the cloud, for the cloud.
It's one thing to build RIAs using desktop development tools like Adobe's Flex. This is a good model and will persist for a long time. Bungee Labs, however, represents a future that I think we're rapidly approaching: a future in which developers write for the web with the web and deploy "to" the web without skipping a beat. It's very cool.
Even better is how Bungee prices this service.
It's a true pay for value model. You don't pay for the tools. You don't pay until you deploy and then you only pay based on real business that your RIA generates, and even then we're talking pennies. The model depends on volume but with how the world is moving to the web, that bet on volume is probably prescient.
There's an open-source play here that is simmering, too. I've talked about it before, though, so I won't belabor it here. Suffice it to say that open source will necessarily look very different in an online world where nothing is ever distributed...including the tools used to build the application in the first place.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to Bungee Labs.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
