Once upon a time a cottage industry of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) vendors emerged to proclaim the next generation of application development. Bungee Labs (which I advise), Coghead, 3tera, and a range of others each stepped up to provide cloud-based platforms for developing cloud-based applications.
This week, however, each of these independent efforts was put on notice by industry heavyweights VMware, Citrix, and Virtual Iron: We're joining the fray.
James Urquhart calls out the significance of of their entries into the cloud platform market:
The long and the short of it is that we have entered into a new era, in which data centers will no longer simply be collections of servers, but will actually be computing units in and of themselves--often made up of similar computing units (e.g. containers) in a sort of fractal arrangement. Virtualization is key to make this happen (though server virtualization itself is not technically absolutely necessary). So are powerful management tools, policy and workflow automation, data and compute load portability, and utility-type monitoring and metering systems.
Indeed. No one is yet making any real money as a cloud infrastructure provider, but already the market is heating up to a boiling point. The entry of VMware and Citrix, in particular, may toll the bell for the independents, or perhaps it will encourage a round of consolidation.
Either way, the nascent cloud-computing industry just became a lot more interesting.
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!?).
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Web 2.0 is all about data, according to Tim O'Reilly, but a company's most important data often goes missing from these data-driven applications. It has simply been too hard to mix old-school application data with new-school presentation layers.
Aberdeen Group notes that 51 percent of enterprises it recently surveyed "plan to integrate a CRM system with a Web 2.0 application," while only 20 percent currently do. Bungee Labs has just released a solution to that quandary. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak....
Enter Bungee Labs. It just announced integration between Netsuite, Oracle CRM On Demand and Saleforce.com (with Microsoft Dynamics and open-source SugarCRM shortly to come) with Web 2.0 applications, easily connected through its platform.
I've been watching Bungee Labs develop its technology for five years, initially as a fan and now as an advisor. It's very cool to see what it has created:
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(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.
... Read moreA friend and I were discussing the state of software adoption yesterday. Our kids were floating down a river toward us, and we had plenty of time to talk about our respective companies as the kids kept repeating the trip.
It struck both of us that the problem with enterprise software is that it tends to forget how people actually work. Things like CRM, ECM, etc., tend to require users to change their normal behavior to fit the application. As a result, they tend to not get used, or at least not unless someone threatens to withhold compensation.
In the Web 2.0 world, Tim O'Reilly has spent the last few years advocating "architectures of participation" (meaning, as Tim further clarifies, that "users pursuing their own 'selfish' interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct" of their participation). But in most enterprise software, users must spin extra cycles to provide group value, e.g., they spend all day in e-mail or on the phone but then have to go to a Web page to record their sales activities in a CRM system.
Surely we're missing something.
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I'm an advisor to Bungee Labs and am spending the day with the company (along with other advisors from Sun, Amazon, etc.). I'm not a developer myself, and so focus more on the community-building activities of the company, but they mentioned an incident at the eBay Developers Conference that I found fascinating.
eBay developed a new eBay Shopping Web Services WSDL. They stopped by the Bungee Labs booth and asked what the company could do with it.
... Read moreBy dragging and dropping components and objects, [Bungee] had a simple application running in minutes. The application had an input field to specify a search query. When you clicked the search button, the query results (item title, gallery URL, View Item URL, etc.) were displayed on the form.
Start to finish, this all took less than 20 minutes. Not bad for working with a new API. And, as [Bungee] pointed out, we never left the web browser!
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