The Web-based app development and hosting company Coghead announced Wednesday that it was shutting down (TechCrunch: Coghead grinds to a halt). Citing general economic pressures (the excuse du jour for layoffs and shutdowns), it told its customers they'd have until April 30 of this year to use their apps. They won't be charged for the service until then, but they won't get any support, either. So the rush is now on for Coghead's users to find a new home for their apps.
At least two companies are hoping to win converts to their competing service platforms: Caspio is offering two months free access to its Caspio Bridge, as well as free support and training. The pitch to Coghead customers: "Caspio offers a more scalable, robust and dependable platform-as-a-service than your previous solution, and our unique unlimited-user pricing is the most business-friendly option anywhere." See Caspio's offer page.
Intuit is offering six months of free service on its QuickBase hosted app platform, as well as two hours of personal consulting, unlimited standard support, and classes specifically for Coghead customers. See Intuit's offer page.
Update: Via the comments to this story, we learn that there are other offers for Coghead customers from TeamDesk, TrackVia, Zoho, and Qrimp (see Data-Driven Web Apps blog for links), and from Iceberg.
After being left high and dry by one cloud-based platform, I can't imagine any Coghead customers making a quick move to another. Even the true believers need more than righteousness to go on. They need to know their hosting companies will survive. A realistic alternative: Do your development on your own servers and host your apps inside your firewall. (For more, see "The firewall vs. the cloud".)
Minus its users, Coghead's technology is moving over to SAP. According to a memo sent to Coghead customers today, "SAP did not assume any of Coghead's customer relationships or obligations," thus paving the way for Caspio and Intuit to open their Coghead refugee camps.
Paul McNamara, Coghead's CEO, told me in an e-mail that "It was a wrenching decision because of the customer impact." And while he is obviously a booster for the platform-in-the-sky model ("It's clear that the benefits of Web-based applications are significant," he says), he also realizes that this situation is not good. He thinks there could eventually be a way to mitigate it: "I'd like to see the development of standards for declarative applications that are represented as XML documents. I think this is the logical evolution for cloud computing. As the industry evolves, we need to address portability and interoperability."
McNamara will not be making the move to SAP.
Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.
Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications.
Bungee Labs charges fees based on production deployment of Bungee-powered applications. The billing rate for Bungee Labs' Grid or Amazon EC2 is $0.06 per user-session-hour rounded to the nearest second-per-user-session. For the public beta, no fees will be charged. The Bungee Application Server (with a VMware-based software appliance for managing and deploying applications across servers) for self-hosting applications starts at $500 per server, per month.
The Bungee Application Server will also be available community source licenses, and the company is considering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) licenses.
See also: Bungee Labs mashing up old-school CRM with new-school Web 2.0
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.
Coghead on Monday plans to launch a second version of its hosted application development platform, which the start-up has moved to Adobe Systems' Flex/Flash technology and Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing infrastructure.
Coghead's hosted service for making Web applications.
(Credit: Coghead)The company is one of several targeting what it calls "do-it-yourself developers" at small and midsize businesses.
Such developers are generally tech-savvy enough to write macros in Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software or work with scripting languages, but they don't have the same level of training as a professional C++ programmer, for example. The company estimates that there are between 15 million and 30 million do-it-yourself developers at such companies, compared with between 3 million and 4 million more highly trained programmers.
With its service, people can visually put together applications by creating forms and by setting up a work flow customized to their needs. It has signed up 25,000 developers.
To improve the performance of its applications, Coghead rewrote the front end of its service in Flex, Adobe's application development environment. Applications are displayed using Flash.
The company abandoned another rich Internet application framework, OpenLaszlo, because Flex brought it significantly better performance, according to Coghead CEO Paul McNamara. Adobe also has a broader ecosystem of third-party tools, he said.
By moving to Adobe technology, Coghead can also enable its developers to create applications using AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime. Coghead will release an update in the middle of the year with the ability to make AIR Web applications that can run online or function as desktop applications.
Its move to Amazon's computing structure, including EC2 and Simple Storage Service (S3), will save Coghead money and provide customers with a more reliable and structure, McNamara said.
The first Web 2.0 Expo is behind us, and it was a good show. In addition to dozens of interesting panels (including, if I do say so, mine), there were about 115 companies presenting on a crowded expo show floor, and six interesting company presentations during the "Launchpad" sessions that ran on Monday and Tuesday.
With Webware.com's Josh Lowensohn and News.com's Erica Ogg, we picked our Top 5 Web 2.0 services from the conference. They are:
- Tellme, which has a new downloadable app for getting useful 411-like info on your mobile phone. (news)
- Octopz, a very slick collaboration service we covered a few days ago. (hands-on)
- Dapper, which can make any Web site into an RSS feed or widget. (field report)
- Coghead, a Web-based database that just came out of beta. (hands-on)
- Spock, the upcoming people search engine. (preview)
Play the video for the full rundown.
When you go to the Coghead site you'll think I'm covering it because the home page says, "Join the Webware revolution." But Coghead is more than just a slogan I can get behind. It's a clean online application builder that takes the complex job of creating an online database and makes it almost simple.
No matter how straightforward the development tool, creating a database application is hard intellectual work. Coghead does a good job of getting out of your way so you can focus on your data structure and entry forms. It will still be intimidating for a database newbie, but if you have a smattering of experience with creating your own databases it should make sense.
Creating a simple database app in Coghead is pretty easy. There's a lot of depth in the system, too.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The service builds your database as you build your forms, and although it's not a relational database system (like MySQL), it does support a hierarchical structure so you can compartmentalize things (clients and salespeople, for example), and still link them together as appropriate. Forms can easily be embedded in your Web pages.
Coghead allows you to do more than just define a database scheme and build forms, though. It's not a programming system, yet it allows logic and process to be built into its database. This ensures that records in a complex application get routed to the right people, and don't have erroneous data in them.
The application runs in Flash (and was written in Open Laszlo) so you can use it on any Flash-capable desktop. It's not as fast as a desktop application or a lightweight HTML-based system, but for most small business applications it's at least as capable, if not more so, than any existing low-price database solution. One thing I didn't find in the current release, though: a reporting function. Even the single-minded online forms database app WuFoo makes it easy to create and run forms and export your data. I'd look for Coghead to add this capability soon (or make it more obvious if it's in there but buried).
Coghead is playing in an important--and new--market. There are interesting competitors here, including online suite maker Zoho, the pure-play online database DabbleDB, and Intuit's venerable QuickBase. Coghead CEO Paul McNamara also sees SalesForce.com's AppExchange as a competitor. Start-ups are still coming into this space, too: I saw a new online database, MyWebDB, at the Web 2.0 Expo. It looks like Coghead has good technology and the company has solid venture funding, including an investment by enterprise app giant SAP. But in this market it's far too early to call a winner or even pick a top three.
The service just came out of beta and single-user accounts are free. It's worth checking out.
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