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.
There's more than one 'app exchange' in town. Coghead launches Gallery for third-party applications.
(Credit: Coghead)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.
Although far smaller, its approach is similar to that of Salesforce.com's AppExchange, where people can find more than 800 customized applications written for Salesforce's development platform.
Hosted development platforms and tools, also called platform-as-a-service, are where a lot of software development is going, according to Web entrepreneurs. Rather than purchase a rack of servers and a software stack to run applications, developers can rely on a hosted platform to offer on-demand applications.
For platform providers, building the largest ecosystem of online Web developers helps accrue business, much the way Microsoft woos users of its development tools to drive sales of Windows and other stack software.
Although not a complete development environment, the latest entrant to this platform-as-a-service category is Google, with its App Engine, still in beta test version. Google now lets developers run their Python applications on the company's massive computing infrastructure.
Last week, Google opened up its own marketplace for listing third-party applications written for its enterprise products, including Google Apps and its search appliance. And on Monday, Google and Salesforce announced that Salesforce's customer relationship management, or CRM, applications, will be integrated into Google Apps through the Salesforce development platform, Force.com.
Open source comes to platform-as-a-service
Coghead's development service and gallery are specifically aimed at small businesses, both developers and customers. It is aiming to recruit value-added resellers or independent consultants with 2 to 20 people, according to company CEO Paul McNamara.
With a hosted development environment, they can write a Web application and get into the software-as-a-service business, he said.
"They used to sell their time for money by doing custom application development. It's a tough business because you're always chasing your next lunch, and if you take vacation, you aren't billing," McNamara said.
"Our value to them is that we let them transform the business by building an application for one customer and then selling it to other customers around the world," he said.
Ultimately, this model is disruptive because many more companies can get off the ground without the need for a large capital investment from venture investors, McNamara said. He added that Salesforce's AppExchange tends to focus more on large independent software vendors, or ISVs.
Developers on the Gallery can choose to take an open-source approach to listing, called the Open Definition model. They can make the template for their application available to others to copy, modify, and distribute--much like open-source projects allow people to tweak the source code.
Since most people don't actually work with source code when they use the Coghead service, they aren't actually using the source code. Another class of applications will be "IP protected," which means that customers can't copy and modify the applications.
Coghead plans to make money from Gallery by collecting a monthly fee for using the platform and listing the applications.
Cloud computing, the notion of outsourcing hardware and software to Internet service providers, is showing the classic signs of disruptive technology--it's not good enough for the masses yet, but it has clear potential to shake things up.
Forrester Research on Monday released a report written by James Staten, an IT operations and infrastructure analyst, saying that cloud computing does not meet the needs of large businesses. But that could be only temporary.
The services offered by a new crop of hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services, are where the overall hosting market is going, according to Staten.
"Cloud computing looks very much like the instantiation of many vendors' visions of the data center of the future; it's an abstracted, fabric-based infrastructure that enables dynamic movement, growth, and protection of services that is billed like a utility. It also has all the earmarks of a disruptive innovation: It is enterprise technology packaged to best fit the needs of small businesses and start-ups--not the enterprise," he wrote.
(Credit:
Forrester Research)
Cloud computing differs from existing hosting services in that services are based on consumption and the technology infrastructure is optimized for hosting several customers. Providers use virtualization extensively and grid computing software.
Forrester identified a wide range of companies as "cloud providers," including Amazon.com, Akamai Technologies, Joyent, Rackspace's Mosso software, and Salesforce.com's Force.com development platform. Microsoft and Google are also rumored to be developing pay-per-drink computing services, such as hosted server processing and storage.
Because these providers are optimized for large-scale hosts, they could eventually serve corporate customers, Forrester said.
"As the gap widens between enterprise and Web giant economics, it may get to the point that it no longer makes financial sense for many businesses to run their own servers. When this happens, will you be a cloud or a cloud customer?" Staten wrote.
NetSuite on Thursday is expected to fill out its online development platform, part of its strategy to deliver industry-specific applications through partners.
The newly named NetSuite Business Operating System (NS-BOS) adds to the company's existing hosted development platform, notably with an integrated code debugger called SuiteScript D-Bug, which will start to be available next month.
With the NS-BOS, NetSuite is targeting independent software vendors (ISVs) with expertise in specific industries that are looking to create a software-as-a-service offering. In particular, the company is trying to enlist client/server application providers that need to create a hosted offering.
As part of its so-called vertical industry push, the company hired Michael Ni as vice president of industry solutions who will spearhead business development with ISVs.
CEO Zach Nelson said that NetSuite's development strategy differs from that of its primary competitor, Salesforce.com, in that NS-BOS' primary purpose is customizing the company's accounting, sales, and ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.
"We're not talking about an Internet operating system where developers build random applications. It's really about building business applications that are embedded in NetSuite," Nelson said.
The tool itself will be free, but NetSuite will share revenue from applications with ISVs. The percentage will depend on the application provider, but will likely be about 50 percent of the price for NetSuite's applications, Nelson said.
Nelson said that there might be some resistance among the individual developers to use NS-BOS, which is closely tied to NetSuite applications, rather than their own tools.
But from a business perspective, the development platform offers the benefit of a hosted infrastructure and the same tools that NetSuite programmers use, he said.
Salesforce.com on Thursday introduced a cheaper way to access applications written with its Force.com platform and detailed an Eclipse-based development tool.
Right now, the fee to use applications written for Force--Salesforce's hosted development platform--is $50 per user per month for an unlimited amount of time.
Saleforce.com's Force integrated development environment for building hosted Web applications.
(Credit: Saleforce.com)The company added another option, in which applications cost $5 per log-in with a maximum of five log-ins per month. This option is meant for applications that are accessed only occasionally, like vacation request programs, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at the company.
Salesforce also announced enhancements to its Eclipse-based development tool that are designed to make it easier to write the user interface portion of a Web application.
Programmers can also save their Force code into source code management systems. It also added Force "Sandbox," a service for testing applications during development.
The new components to the development platform are designed to give programmers more sophisticated tools for on-demand applications, Gross said.
Salesforce.com next week intends to detail an extension to its Web-based developer platform that it claims will put it on par with traditional offline development tools.
At the Dreamforce developer conference in San Francisco next week, company executives will introduce Force.com, the new name for a set of tools and hosted services for building hosted Web applications.
It will also introduce an addition to its hosted development platform called Visualforce, a service that allows a developer to create a customized application user interface. Conference attendees will get access to a developer preview of Visualforce.
Visualforce complements existing developer-oriented services, including
The introduction of the user interface service is significant because it makes Salesforce.com's hosted development platform a more viable alternative to Java or .Net, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at the company.
Whereas Salesforce.com applications are typically sold to salespeople, its Force.com development platform is aimed squarely at IT managers and chief information officers, said Gross.
"This user interface layer allows the applications that we serve to be opened up to new classes of users and devices," he said. "A different kind of person (than the Salesforce.com application customer) is buying this for a different reason--the same person who is making .Net of Java buying decisions."
For those who don't attend the Dreamforce conference next week, the technology preview of Visualforce will be available in the fourth quarter this year.
BOSTON--eBay on Monday opened the doors to its developer conference, where the commerce giant announced a batch of new application-programming interfaces, or APIs, and showed off its new desktop application.
The company announced better-performing shopping Web services, an API for bidding on goods and a way to notify users about auctions through automated alerts.
In addition, the company is expected to demonstrate the desktop application for accessing eBay services, code-named the San Dimas project, during the morning keynote speech.
The software was built using Adobe's AIR platform which enables people to write applications with Web-based toolkits that operate like traditional desktop programs.
Update: Alan Lewis, the program manager for Sam Dimas at eBay, announced during the morning keynote that the beta program is open. People who attend the developer conference will get preferred access to the program, Lewis said.
eBay's desktop application keeps people connected to online auctions but operates and looks like other desktop applications.
(Credit: eBay)On top of releasing new commerce APIs and a new API for mobile PayPal applications, eBay upped the limit on the number of calls that developers can make to eBay's platform per month without paying a transaction fee.
Developers can write applications that make 150,000 calls per month to eBay's Web services, which was bumped up from 10,000. The goal is to simplify the process of letting developers create eBay-connected applications online, according to company executives.
"Before when you were using their API, you had to register for keys and get certified--you had to jump through a lot of hoops," said Jeremy Schoemaker, president of Shoemoney Media Group which is an eBay developer. "Now you can do a lot of basic functionality for free."
Microsoft is rescheduling its Professional Developers Conference originally set to be held in October this year in Los Angeles.
The PDC is the company's premier developer event where it outlines major platform strategies. At the 2003 event, top executives, including Bill Gates, outlined the core components of Longhorn, which became Windows Vista.
Because Microsoft has released or is close to releasing many of its developer platform products, it has chosen to reschedule this year's PDC, according to a notice on its MSDN developer network Web site.
"By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed 'Katmai,' Visual Studio codenamed 'Orcas' and Silverlight will already be in developers' hands and approaching launch, which is where we?ll focus our developer engagement in the near term," it said.
Salesforce.com on Monday is expected to announce a way move data between different applications using its online development platform.
At the company's first developer conference, executives will introduce Salesforce SOA, an extension to its Apex programming language that allows developers to integrate different applications via Web services protocols. Salesforce will host and run the custom-written integration code.
People can already write mashups that run within a browser, such as an application that displays customer information from Salesforce's sales application on a Web mapping service.
Salesforce SOA, by contrast, does the integration between programs on the server, which allows for more sophisticated scenarios, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer relations at Salesforce.com.
A mashup could, for example, let someone display and manipulate customer information on a Google Web-based spreadsheet.
Salesforce has modified Apex so that people can handle the files, called Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files, that allow programmers to get information from Web services, Gross said.
Both Apex and Salesforce SOA are expected to be generally available in December.
Separately, Salesforce on Monday announced AppExchange Venture Network, a program to encourage entrepreneurs and investors to write applications that run on Salesforce's application platform.
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