kennyo wrote: Actually, Egenera's CEO is staying on as Board chairman. As the company transitions to be a multi-platform player, the feeling is to have management who are experts about software, the converged infrastructure market, and familiar with the players in the space. Ergo the new CEO, and ergo the new levels of backing from investors. The company is still hiring in its field and OEM spaces, and in conversations with multiple IHV partners.
For cloud computing to take off, there need to be tools available that enable a developer to build and deploy an application without having to download anything to their desktop. This requires an on-demand development tool that sits on top of the cloud and provides a development Platform as a Service (PaaS).
There are two paths that a vendor can take to create a development platform for cloud computing: cloud-first or tool-first.
Cloud-first approach to PaaS: first build a cloud platform, then build a development tool that runs on top of it. This is the approach pioneered by Force.com and followed by Coghead and Bungee Labs.
Tool-first approach to PaaS: first build a development platform that is host-able tool (e.g., studio runs in a browser), then "push" that platform into the cloud. This is the approach taken by WaveMaker.
For Force.com, it made a great deal of sense to take the cloud-first approach. SalesForce.com already had a robust cloud platform and expertise in building proprietary development tools to create their CRM application. There was also no requirement to make Force.com work on any other cloud, because SalesForce is aiming to be the only cloud you will ever need for all your enterprise apps.
For most software vendors, however, the cloud-first development process has distinct disadvantages. First of all, it puts you in the data center operations business, which requires a very different DNA than software development. Next, it makes development itself difficult, because the cloud adds a level of indirection and complexity to all development tasks. Finally, you will be forced to do cloud port eventually to get to a SaaS cloud people want to deploy on, like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine (assuming they ever exit the Python ghetto).
A tool-first approach to PaaS development is much more straightforward. You start by creating a host-able development studio (pretty much rules out Eclipse plugins) and do your build and test on standard hardware. After you have build a solid product, you add multi-tenancy to the studio and customize deployment for your cloud of choice (or use a partner like Elastra to do the deployment and administration for you).
A final oddity of the cloud-first vendors is that they have all delivered proprietary development platforms. This provides a "roach motel" level of lock-in - your logic and data can checkin, but just try moving them to another RIA or AJAX platform! Again, SalesForce can throw its 500-pound gorilla weight around and make the Apex language successful. It is hard to imagine, however, that 5 years from now people who have learned the Coghead language will be in more demand than, say, Java developers.
About Christopher Keene Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). Chris was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.After leaving Persistence Software in 2005, Chris spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business-intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school.
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#3
Claeton Giordano commented on 3 Nov 2008
Proprietary development toolsets have a long history. PowerBuilder and VisualBasic didn't offer the flexibility and power of C, but they enabled rapid, if inelegant, development of business apps. In the Cloud, the same could end up being true of Coghead. There are a lot of reasons why that would be a suboptimal outcome, nonetheless a possible one.
#2
NS commented on 25 Aug 2008
What about other PaaS vendors like LongJump and Quickbase? Anyone have experience in using them?
Don't forget tools that help create "cloud-like" Utility Computing infrastructures out of what you own today (any HW, any VM). Cassatt can primarily do this, although there are other less automated tools on the market too, and even VMware has its eyes on trying to help make clouds.
These tools can automate how HW is repurposed, how and when VMs are created, where networks should be routed etc. etc. with the express purpose of maintaining application service levels, regardless of demand. This is essentially PaaS that is the underpinning behind "clouds".
Claeton Giordano wrote: Proprietary development toolsets have a long history. PowerBuilder and VisualBasic didn't offer the flexibility and power of C, but they enabled rapid, if inelegant, development of business apps. In the Cloud, the same could end up being true of Coghead. There are a lot of reasons why that would be a suboptimal outcome, nonetheless a possible one.
Ken Oestreich wrote: Don't forget tools that help create "cloud-like" Utility Computing infrastructures out of what you own today (any HW, any VM). Cassatt can primarily do this, although there are other less automated tools on the market too, and even VMware has its eyes on trying to help make clouds.
These tools can automate how HW is repurposed, how and when VMs are created, where networks should be routed etc. etc. with the express purpose of maintaining application service levels, regardless of demand. This is essentially PaaS that is the underpinning behind "clouds".
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The world’s most powerful supercomputer is Jaguar, the recently upgraded Cray XT5 rig at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, according to the new semi-annual Top500 list. Jaguar’s roughly 250,000 processors went from quad-core Opterons to six-core Istanbul Opterons and no...
I read an article by an author on Ulitzer.com and was amazed at the professional image it provided him. I immediately researched Ulitzer to see if there was yet hope for me. I am a technology blogger on the subject of mobile computing strategies. As I was doing research I came a...
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The rise of RIAs and cloud computing, and the increased diversity of Internet-connected devices are spawning the need for contextual applications that take advantage of specific functionality offered by operating systems and devices. The Flash Platform enables developers to creat...
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