Latest News from Christopher Keene

The Web is the New App Store

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:43:33 EDT

I attended the GigaOm Mobilize conference (where VMware was well represented by CTO Steve Herrod) and came away with a few observations that are relevant for our overall mobile strategy:

The web is the new app store. I had dinner with the heads of mobile for two large retail chains. Although each of them have multiple App Store apps, the vast majority of their mobile business is coming through the safari browser and not the app store. Consumer behavior is to go to the web to buy things, even on mobile.
There are only two mobile markets, native iPhone and mobile web.The shift to HTML5 (+Phone gap if necessary) is happening rapidly. Almost every speaker talked of the html5/jquery/phonegap stack with a few native iPhone holdouts (e.g., gaming, iPhone only apps like Hipmonk). Phone gap allows html5 apps to access native smartphone features and be packaged for native app stores, effectively erasing the lines between html5 and native. There was zero discussion of native development for Android or any other non-iPhone platform.

Here are some intriguing, but less well formed conference themes:

Notifications are the "home page" for mobile apps. Mobile apps force developers to rethink and simplify enterprise apps - making them more modular and "attention-driven"
iPad is rapidly changing expectations about how web apps work. SalesForce's Do.com is using the iPad as their primary web platform and porting from there to browsers and smartphones.

Darwin's Cloud

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:07:50 EDT

RedHat conducted a survey of over 1,200 VMworld attendees on their cloud plans. Here is the question that I found most interesting:

What primary development framework are you planning to use in the cloud?

Java EE 32%
.NET 29%
PHP 14%
Python 6%
Spring 6%
Ruby/Rails 5%

If you take this at face value, the ideal PaaS for the enterprise would support Java EE, .NET and PHP. So far, this is well beyond the capabilities of the existing PaaS vendors.

In particular, there is no PaaS vendor bridging the Java/.NET divide. This raises a natural question: what is the fastest way to evolve cloud platforms?

There are two approaches to filling in these PaaS framework holes:

Do it yourself: Heroku just added Java support to their cloud. Because PaaS offerings from Amazon and Heroku are proprietary, they are pretty much stuck with the go it alone approach.
Create an ecosystem: Cloud Foundry just added PhP and Python support through partners. A huge advantage for open source clouds is that they can leverage the work of their communities to move farther and faster than closed-source competitors.

Open source clouds should be able to sustain a faster rate of revolution, provided that they can continue to build vibrant communities that contribute back to the core project.

Cloud Foundry is the LAMP Stack of Cloud Computing

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:05:42 EDT

Just as the LAMP stack provided a core foundation next gen for web applications, Cloud Foundry is providing a core foundation for next gen cloud platforms.

Cloud Foundry announced today that two new startups are building their clouds based on Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry is proving itself to be truly the foundry for creating entirely new cloud offerings:

ActiveState is building a cloud for Python and Django and contributing code to support Python back to the Cloud Foundry open source project.
Appfog is building a cloud for PHP developers and contributing code to support PHP back to the Cloud Foundry open source project

The beauty of this is that innovative startups are able to start with a scalable cloud "stack" that gives them a multi-language PaaS without locking them into a particular cloud provider.

So for example, Appfog gets to use Cloud Foundry's best in class PaaS services and then target deployment to Amazon's EC2 and services like S3. Appfog CEO Lucas Carlson blogged here about how standing on the shoulders of cloud computing giants will allow Appfog to win in the cloud by providing the most compelling user experience.

Expect to see the pace of innovation accelerate dramatically going forward!

DevOps and PaaS - Friend or Foe?

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:21:53 EDT

DevOps, which I will arbitrarily define here as "automating SysAdmin tasks to streamline application lifecycle management," raises important questions about the cloud.

Developers may ask: "if I have a self-service portal for deploying applications (aka PaaS), do I need SysAdmins at all?"
SysAdmins may ask: "isn't PaaS just a monstrous black box that prevents me from provisioning the specific services we need to deploy real-world apps?"
VMware asks: "what if you could get a PaaS that wasn't black box, enabling developers to deploy apps easily while still giving SysAdmins the ability to provision any services they needed (aka Cloud Foundry)?

I had a good conversation recently with John Willis of DTO Solutions (twitter feed here) in which he waxed eloquent on how DevOps and Cloud Foundry can live together in harmony. Here were the key points I took away:

SysAdmins distrust the black box nature of PaaS: Typical sysadmin thinks that they can get to 75% of PaaS functionality with DevOps tools like Chef without giving up any systems architecture flexibility. In contrast, PaaS solutions like Heroku provide developers an easy to use PaaS but gives SysAdmins zero ability to add services that Heroku doesn't support.
Cloud Foundry solves the SysAdmin aversion to cloud vapor: CloudFoundry runs anywhere, incuding on your laptop. Cloud Foundry's service container concept is particularly strong, kind of an appliance on steroids.

There is a strong natural between DevOps and PaaS. Products like Chef and Puppet are strongest for installing and configuring the OS and middleware stack. PaaS solutions like Cloud Foundry excel it deploying application architectures.

The holy grail is to use Chef or Puppet provisioning Cloud Foundry services that can then be easily consumed by developers. DTO Solutions is putting on events to show SysAdmins how to make this happen.

You can also register for the a DevOps HackDay featuring CloudFoundry. The first one is being put on at VMware, September 8, 2011.

PaaS Is a Cloaking Layer for Clouds

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:00:00 EDT

We seem to be coming to the end of the definition of Platform as a Service (PaaS) blog posts and are now moving on to the more pressing question of what is PaaS good for? In a recent Paul Maritz talk at GigaOm Structure conference, he referred to PaaS as "a cloaking layer for clouds." This is an elegant definition for a rapidly expanding market of add-on cloud services. If Cloud 1.0 is a set of servers in the sky (think Amazon EC2), then Cloud 2.0 is a layer of services that hide the complexity of developing, deploying and managing applications in the cloud (think CloudFoundry). The API for Cloud 1.0 is the virtual machine/OS. The API for Cloud 2.0 is the application container itself - services like CloudFoundry, Elastic Beanstalk from Amazon and Heroku allow a developer to hand over an application to the application container without having to know anything about what operating system that application is running on or how it communicates with other services like load balancing, failover and database.

Where is the Killer App for PaaS?

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 19:57:22 EDT

Over the last month, I have had lengthy discussions about developer adoption of Platform as a Service with two of my favorite cloud computing analysts - John Rymer of Forrester and Michael Cote of RedMonk.

The net of these conversations that we are still early in the adoption curve for PaaS. In particular, developers are not yet demanding PaaS the way operations people are demanding Virtualization.

Here is my summary of these discussion:

Developers are wary of PaaS: developers are not overly keen on PaaS at the moment. They are not yet mentally prepared to give up the middleware layer of their applications. Lacking a compelling reason to use PaaS, developers are sticking with tried and try development stacks.
PaaS for existing apps has limited benefit: For existing applications, there's not much to gain by simply moving from non-cloud modes to cloud modes. This is the foundation of Cote's Cloud Rule - "if it ain't broke, don't cloud it".
PaaS fits best for new apps: with new applications, the benefits of PaaS (cost and agility) all seem to line up.

This means that cloud vendors need to "connect the dots" for developers and business managers to accelerate their adoption of cloud platforms. In particular, there are two

PaaS lowers the bar for web development: PaaS solutions like Cloud Foundry and WaveMaker make the cloud's benefits available to everyone, not just the A-Team. Of course, this requires significant education to let business developers know that easier web dev tools exist.
PaaS speeds the delivery of apps for all developers: Michael Cote recently argued that speed is the killer app for cloud. Again, this requires market education to get the word out that quantifies these benefits.

The World Is Your Oyster: Installing and Using Cloud Foundry on Windows

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 20:19:04 EDT

Cloud Foundry is an incredibly cool way to build and deploy cloud apps to any target cloud using very simple commands.

The basic api has just three commands:

vmc target cloud.url //targets a cloud
vmc login // login to cloud
vmc push // run your app in the cloud

Three commands and the (cloud) world is your oyster! Very cool.

This may be just me but I found it difficult to follow the install guide for Cloud Foundry on my windows machine. For those of us trapped behind corporate firewalls and proxy servers, things got even more complicated.

After scurrying around the cloud foundry forums and stackoverflow, here are my slightly revised notes for getting Cloud Foundry running on a Windows machine using a proxy server:

1. Apply for a Cloud Foundry account at www.cloudfoundry.com you will be notified by email when your account is activated

2. Install Ruby from www.rubyinstaller.org. The Cloud Foundry cloud controller command line is built in Ruby so this is required. As the installer runs, make sure to check the boxes to add the ruby directory to your command path

3. Start the Windows command line client on windows by typing "run cmd" in start menu

4. Install the Cloud Controller software. Type:

gem install vmc

If you are behind a firewall, you will get a nasty error message:

ERROR: Could not find a valid gem 'vmc' (>=0) in any repository

5. Install vmc gem through a proxy server, type:

gem install --http-proxy http://proxy.vmware.com:3128 vmc

Congratulations! The Cloud Foundry Cloud Controller is now installed. From here on, you can type Cloud Foundry commands into the Windows command window.

6. Tell Cloud Foundry which cloud you want to connect to. Type:

vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com

Again, if you are benhind a firewall, you will get the error message

Host is not valid: 'http://api.cloudfoundry.com

7. To communicate with Cloud Foundry through a proxy server, set the environment variable "http_proxy". In the command window, type

set http_proxy=http://proxy.vmware.com:3128

vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com

8. Login to Cloud Foundry

vmc login

Enter your email address and password

9. Create a simple Ruby application.

cd \

mkdir hello

cd hello

The above commands create a "C:\hello" directory. Using a text editor type the following and save the file as "hello.rb"

require 'sinatra'

get '/' do

"Hello from Cloud Foundry +VMware and may I add you look dashing today?"

end

11. Publish the application to the cloud. Type:

vmc push

The following prompts will appear :

Would you like to deploy from the current directory? [Yn]

Assuming that you are in the hello directory hit enter (this answers Yes)

Application Name: hello_username

NOTE: use a unique name for your application best to concat your user name and "hello"

Application Deployed URL: ‘hello_username.cloudfoundry.com’?

Press enter to accept default

Detected a Sinatra Application, is this correct? [Yn]

Press enter to accept default

Memory Reservation [Default:128M] (64M, 128M, 256M, 512M, 1G or 2G)

Press enter to accept default (128MB)

Creating Application: OK...

Would you like to bind any services to ‘hello’ [yN]:

Press enter, you don’t want to bind any services for this example

12. Launch a web browser and go to your Application Deployment URL.

Now wasn't that easy?

Death by Cloud - How Amazon is Killing Open Source Software

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:41:22 EDT

The mood at last week's Open Source Think Tank was surprisingly somber. Two years ago, the open source community was celebrating huge acquisitions such as Sun's purchase of MySQL (and even the VMware acquisition of WaveMaker). This year, the consensus was that the economic model which led to success for companies like MySQL and RedHat is being fundamentally disrupted by cloud computing.

For example, Amazon recently launched a successful Relational Database Service (RDS). This hugely profitable service is based on MySQL, but Amazon doesn't pay MySQL a penny for it. This spells death for the traditional open source business model.

To understand why, let's look at how the open source model used to work. The open source business model has traditionally been based on two revenue streams: 1) revenue from OEMs who embed an open source product into their commercial offering and 2) revenue from providing support services for production systems that embed an open source product.

Whenever a company embedded MySQL into their commercial offering, they had to either license their own product under an open source license like GPL or buy a commercial license from MySQL. Just as importantly, a company using MySQL in a production environment would purchase support from MySQL as an insurance policy.

Now let's look at Amazon RDS. First of all, Amazon gets around the GPL license because they are not delivering binaries to their customers. This means that Amazon can deliver a commercial service without being forced to open source their own software. Next, Amazon has sufficient internal expertise on MySQL that they can provide their own support.

The open source community has tried to fight back. For example, the new Affero GPL license (AGPL) was supposed to fix the loophole which allows Amazon to deliver MySQL as a commercial service. However, since almost nobody is using the AGPL license, every OSS project faces the prospect of seeing someone else deliver commercial services based on their product for which they don't get paid.

New open source companies are trying to get ahead of this trend by offering their own cloud-based service - such as Cloudera (Hadoop). This is a good idea, but it is not clear how these stand alone services will be able to compete with Amazon's Elastic Mapreduce service, also based on Hadoop.

Of course, none of this is going to stop the success of the open source movement in general. There are many projects which have no commercial aspirations. However, until open source companies can articulate a business model that can thrive in the cloud, this does cap the potential valuations of open source companies and hence their access to venture capital.

Cote's rule: If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:52:38 EDT

I took the title of this post from a recent blog entry by Michael Cote. Cloud enthusiasts (often people with limited operations experience) talk in grandiose terms of moving the entire data center to a public cloud. Cloud naysayers (often people with extensive operations experience) talk in detail about all the things you can't get in the cloud, like latency, lack of multi-cast, weaker security etc.

In general, cloud computing fits modern web architectures very well, by which I mean any app built to support a web browser client. These applications are "cloud-ready" and require little effort to move to a public or private cloud.

In general, any application not build to support a web browser client is going to be problematic to move into the cloud. These applications often rely on technologies that are not readily available in the cloud, such as multi-cast.

The decision to cloud or not to cloud is not a binary decision made at the data center level. Instead, it is a more nuanced decision made at the app level.

Similarly, the decision to go public cloud or private cloud is a decision made at the app level.

At the margin, be governed by Cote's Rule of Cloud Migration: If it ain’t broke, don’t cloud it!

WaveMaker Springs To VMware

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 12:15:00 EST

We are announcing today that WaveMaker has been acquired by VMware. This partnership is the result of discussions that have been going on between WaveMaker and the SpringSource division of VMware for more than a year.

I have always had great respect for how Rod Johnson revitalized and simplified the Java market with the Spring framework and developer projects. When we started development of WaveMaker over three years ago, we chose Spring as our foundation.

WaveMaker is based on the Spring framework but targets a different audience: non-expert developers looking for the easiest way to build web apps.

It turns out that this is a very large market. According to Gartner, only 20% of IT staff have expert app development skills - WaveMaker is the tool to enable the other 80% of IT to build web apps quickly and deploy them to the cloud with a single mouse click.

As WaveMaker went from 3,000 downloads a month in January, 2010 to 135,000 downloads a month in December, 2010, we realized that we had created the perfect "on ramp" for cloud computing. WaveMaker can play a big role in bringing large numbers of developers to the cloud, but only if we team with the right cloud partner.

With VMware and SpringSource, we have found that partner!

The good news here is that VMware will continue to support and provide services to the WaveMaker customers, via the same team that provided it before.

For Rod’s perspective on the acquisition check out his blog post here.

PaaS Takes Center Stage

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:22:00 EST

Powerful Web 2.0

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:55:00 EDT

Rich Bianco over at the Displaced Guy blog just wrote a post entitled WaveMaker delivers for the cloud like PowerBuilder did for client-server. In it, he talks about using WaveMaker to migrate PowerBuilder applications to Java. "I’ve spent most of my career doing PowerBuilder development against every major DBMS and I still believe it offers productivity beyond anything on the market for client-server applications. But the writing is on the wall for client-server and rich internet applications and WaveMaker are the future." It has taken WaveMaker almost 3 years to build a worthy replacement for PowerBuilder. We certainly have not achieved the full breadth of functionality that developers can get from mature client/server tools like PowerBuilder, MS Access and Oracle Forms. However, for developers who want a fast and easy way to build Web 2.0 applications, WaveMaker rocks!

Migrating from Microsoft to Open Cloud Tools

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 19:45:00 EDT

A recent survey of WaveMaker's 15,000 developers found that over 20% had moved to WaveMaker as an alternative to Microsoft development tools like MS Access and MS .NET. "Microsoft shops" typically employ a variety of Microsoft products and have dozens to hundreds of applications that now need to be migrated. In short, WaveMaker provides a much gentler path for migrating from the Microsoft Borg to the wonderful world of open standards, but there is still a cost for all that flexibility.

Citrix & WaveMaker - A Little Leverage Goes a Long Way

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:08:00 EDT

Citrix and WaveMaker's partnership to deliver a complete cloud development platform is gaining attention. This week, John Abbott of the 451 Group wrote a piece on how the Citrix Cloud Center strategy is coming together, thanks to a little help from WaveMaker (registration required). The Citrix/WaveMaker development and test solution gives Cloud Hosting Providers a way to build a cloud ecosystem that will help them attract and retain customers.

WaveMaker in the Warehouse

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 17:47:03 EDT

Althought the iPad is getting all the press these days, WaveMaker customers are building pretty compelling apps with plain old ruggedized PCs.

This week we announced an application built using WaveMaker that meets the demanding requirements of warehouse loading docks for grocery stores and retail chains.

The Costa Solutions warehouse loading dock application runs on handheld tablet PCs from Motion Computing. Because internet connectivity is not reliable on warehouse loading docks, where, the WaveMaker app is architected to run in both connected and offline modes.

When the tablet is offline, data and pictures are collected and stored on the tablet PC. When internet connectivity is re-established, WaveMaker automatically synchronizes the changes back to the logistics data center.

The application includes digital signature capture, digital camera integration, counterfeiting protection and automatic application update.

Free Alternative To Microsoft Access - WaveMaker

Fri, 28 May 2010 19:05:42 EDT

Getting somewhat adventurous, I started a new blog and created a post on Free Alternatives to Microsoft Access.

We see it as our patriotic duty ;-) to make the world safe from proprietary client/server platforms.

Enterprises are increasingly moving from proprietary platforms like Microsoft Access to open Java platforms. Yet training Microsoft Access developers to use complex Java tools can be time consuming and costly.

WaveMaker provides a unique solution for migrating Microsoft Access developers and applications to open Java standards. WaveMaker's visual development tools are easy for Microsoft Access developers to use, while generating standard Java code that runs in any Java server.

WaveMaker's visual, drag and drop studio is ideal for developers who want to focus on creating enterprise applications, not coding. In particular, WaveMaker flattens the learning curve for moving from proprietary platforms like Microsoft Access to open Java.

WaveMaker 6.1 - Cloud Development On A Roll!

Thu, 13 May 2010 15:37:38 EDT

WaveMaker is on a roll - having hit profitability at the end of last year, we are now targeting 300% growth for 2010. This week, we announced the latest release of WaveMaker.

With our 6.1 released, WaveMaker truly delivers on our "PowerBuilder for the Cloud" vision. We are the only company offering visual, browser-based development of cloud applications that comply with enterprise Java standards.

By eliminating the complexity of building and deploying cloud applications, WaveMaker 6.1 enables these Citizen Developers to take advantage of cloud computing. Cool new features include:

One-click deployment to Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, Eucalyptus and OpSource.
Automated multi-tenancy and secure, tenant ID-based data isolation
Dynamic widget loading for up to 500% faster performance.
Rich text editor, Twitter feed and other widgets.
Improved SVN integration for team development

In keeping with Gartner's prediction that cloud computing will create a major shift in how "Citizen Developers" build applications, we are seeing the bulk of our growth come from companies migrating from proprietary platforms to open Java. WaveMaker is an ideal open Java alternative for Oracle Apex, Microsoft Access, Microsoft .NET, PowerBuilder, Lotus Notes and Coldfusion.

Get started with WaveMaker today by going to www.wavemaker.com/download!

CIOs Beware: Citizen Developers Are on the Loose

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:45:00 EDT

Gartner this week released a report entitled "Citizen Developers are Poised to Grow." The report by Gartner Analyst Eric Knipp describes how forces like more computer literate employees, cloud computing and better tools are fundamentally changing the role of IT. Eric paints a vision that in one stroke could eliminate the feared IT backlog: "Citizen developers leverage shared services and 4GL-style development platforms, releasing IT resources to do what they do best, if IT leaders allow it." Gartner argues that CIOs should enable business analysts to build "self-service" applications that can be managed centrally by IT. This puts IT in the role of providing a secure infrastructure while enabling business developers to implement business processes using 4GL-like tools.

WaveMaker's Community Grows and Grows

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 14:25:00 EST

Open source companies live or die by the health of their communities. WaveMaker's proudest achievement last year was creating a passionate and rapidly growing community.

Thinking back, probably our most important decision affecting community health was made early in the year, when we decided to dump our AGPL license in favor of Apache.

Although we had never gotten direct feedback that the community didn't like AGPL, we had more forum posts than we thought was healthy that asked pointed questions about our licensing. This let us know that people were confused, and if there was any doubt in our minds, the licensing debacle at Ext js convinced us that Keep-It-Simple-Stupid is the only way to go here.

Once community developers felt confident that they could do what they wanted to do with our Community edition without somehow triggering a commercial fee down the road, the community literally exploded. Together, here is what we accomplished in 2009:

Stunning community growth: 18 months after our product launch, the number of registered developers for WaveMaker (15,00) is about one third the size of the Spring community (49,000)!
Profitability: WaveMaker closed 2009 as a profitable company and saw revenue growth of 53% in our last 3 months!
Gartner recognition: WaveMaker was featured in 9 different Gartner reports last year, including one which identified WaveMaker as the only open source platform for cloud development!

Why the tidal wave of support for WaveMaker? That's easy - WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy to build great-looking, standards-based Java applications.

Web 2.0 enabler: at companies like Macy's, National City Bank and Pioneer Energy, WaveMaker enables non-Java developers to create Java apps with minimal training.
Productivity multipier: at ISVs and systems integrators, WaveMaker reduces development costs for Java and Web 2.0 applications by over 75%.

WaveMaker Finds Pot of Gold On Top of Cloud

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:30:00 EST

WaveMaker started 2009 staring into the abyss and ended the year on top of the clouds - funny how things work out in the startup world. During the year, WaveMaker doubled annual revenues and achieved profitability while also increasing quarterly sales by over 53%. The biggest momentum driver came from the success of our Cloud Quick Start Partnership with IBM, Amazon and RightScale. We also started seeing significant sell-through from SaaS ISVs and systems integration partners.

Dead Horse and Cloud Computing

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:30:00 EST

With full credit to the Geek and Poke blog, the funniest nerd cartoon I have seen all year!

Cloud Computing Is the Destination, Not the Journey

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:00:00 EST

I have had some interesting conversations recently with partners about how cloud computing will affect the developer tools market. I don't believe developers jump on a band wagon just because they like the wagon. They jump on the wagon because they like where the wagon is going! Roughly every 10 years, a technology disruption changes developer aspirations and drives them to adopt new tools that get them to new places.

The Release of Wavemaker 6

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:56:00 EST

Before I head off for my favorite holiday, I wanted to send out an update on Wavemaker.

Our big news of course centers around the release of Wavemaker 6. This release was over a year in the making and represents the first open source cloud development platform on the market (hook up wavemaker with eucalyptus and you have your own open source answer to Force.com and Azure!).

On the business side, WaveMaker continues to drive strong revenue growth in a down economy, putting us in reach our objective to achieve profitability by the end of the year!

Just to brag a bit, here are some analyst quotes from our WaveMaker 6 press release:

"WaveMaker's open source cloud development platform provides an important approach for customers adopting cloud computing," said Judith Hurwitz, author of Cloud Computing for Dummies and President of Hurwitz & Associates. "WaveMaker's ability to create partnerships with IBM, Amazon and RightScale also illustrates the value of an open source business model."
"WaveMaker is easing the migration path for Java developers who want to bring existing application logic and data into a SaaS environment, while still retaining control over their deployment options," said Phil Wainewright, industry analyst at Procullux Ventures. "With automated support for robust multi-tenant databases, WaveMaker 6.0 advances software developers even further along the path towards realizing the full benefits of the SaaS model."
"Cloud computing is fast maturing, but one lagging indicator is developer tools designed specifically for cloud deployment," said James Governor, principal analyst at RedMonk. "WaveMaker aims to change that with their 6.0 release, an open source toolset, and relationships with key players such as IBM, Amazon and RightScale."

WaveMaker 6.0 SaaS-enables Web Apps in Minutes

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Until today, web developers creating SaaS apps have been faced with an ugly choice: use proprietary development platforms like Force.com or build an open solution from scratch. WaveMaker released the first open cloud development platform. WaveMaker 6.0 is a visual development platform that runs in a browser. WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to prototype, develop and customize great looking web applications.

Vendors Will Have To Climb Higher To Reach Clouds

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:06:36 EST

Hard on the heels of the VMWare/SpringSource acquisition, VMWare entered into a grand alliance with Cisco and EMC (although technically, VMWare announcing an alliance with EMC is like Buick announcing an alliance with GM).

Once the data center is fully virtualized, resilient and automated, it becomes the proverbial black box. As long as it is secure and performant, where it is located or what the hardware layer looks like is unimportant.

Any company whose value proposition is centered around feeds and speeds is going to have to scramble higher up the stack. If your target customer is hardcore data center guys, you are going to find fewer and fewer of those folks to talk to.

As customer IT shifts from hardware to solutions, vendors will have to climb higher up the value chain to keep engaged with their customers. With its Unified Computing System, network vendors like Cisco are becoming data center solution vendors. With Spring, virtualization vendors like VMWare are becoming development solution vendors.

At the top of the cloud stack is Platform as a Service (PaaS), which manages both how applications are developed and how they can be customized by end users. At WaveMaker, we see PaaS as the primary lever for delivering value from the cloud.

As IT vendors climb higher to deliver more complete solutions to their customers, PaaS will emerge as the heart of the cloud ecosystem.

Ecosystem is the Killer App for Cloud Computing

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

We know all about these loose ecosystems of Barney-loving, hand-holding, kumbaya-singing companies who promise a full solution to help you take advantage of the next overwhelming wave of technology...for a fee. In the past, vendor ecosystem announcements indicate a vague intention on the part of the vendors to do something together someday - providing they can all find a customer to pay for it. With the cloud, however, ecosystems are different. They are easier to create, both from a business and technical point of view. They are also much more transparent, as the results of their efforts are available for the whole world to see.

What Separates a Cloud From (Water) Vapor?

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

I spoke this morning with the cloud evangelist for a hardware manufacturer. Not surprisingly, they come at cloud from the iron up, so for them cloud is mostly about virtualization with a little more buzz.

While I can understand this viewpoint, if today's cloud is just yesterday's server consolidation in new clothes, then Larry Ellison's latest "a cloud is just water vapor" rant is probably appropriate.

So what exactly is the dividing line between virtualization and true cloud goodness? I think the key lies in bringing together a fuller solution with a cloud platform than with a virtualization platform.

Cloud computing gets interesting when the platform includes not just deployment (infrastructure as a service or IaaS) but also development (platform as a service or PaaS). Linking these two capabilities opens up fundamentally new markets as well as compelling economics.

Virtualization is about abstracting application deployment so that one box can run many apps, with each app pretending that it is lord and master of it's virtual computer. The value of virtualization is to reduce the amount of hardware needed to run a set of apps and correspondingly reducing the amount of systems administration time needed to manage the overall data center.

Cloud computing is about abstracting application development and deployment so that anyone can develop and manage applications without needing specialized expertise. The value of cloud computing is to reduce all IT costs while increasing organizational flexibility. More people can build the apps they need and fewer expert developers, DBAs and systems administrators are needed.

At its core, virtualization improves IT efficiency - doing traditional computing with fewer resources. On the other hand, cloud computing improves IT effectiveness - empowering more people to build applications with more flexibility and fewer experts. For example, this is the core value prop behind IBM's Cloud Quickstart Program, which includes IBM, Amazon EC2, WaveMaker and RightScale.

Our view at WaveMaker is that the big private cloud payoff comes only when you make both development and deployment of web apps radically easier (cloud-ready computing). If you will, virtualization and private cloud management (IaaS) both reduce the administration costs - the cost transformation comes when you slash not just administration but also development and maintenance costs (IaaS + PaaS).

Running Chrome Inside of Internet Explorer

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 10:00:00 EDT

Internet Explorer, particularly versions 6 and before, are the bane of any web developer's existence. The Internet Explorer versions Microsoft produced during the competion-free era between when Netscape died and Firefox came on the scene are masterpieces of monopolistic neglect. IE 5 and IE6 are slow, proprietary and just plain awful to work with. Worst of all, Microsoft guaranteed themselves longtime domination of the corporate browser market through this cynical behavior because all the web apps built for IE 5 and 6 are so full of hacks that they won't run on "modern" browsers!

Making Cloud Computing Ridiculously Easy

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 05:15:00 EDT

With all the hullabaloo about cloud computing, it is easy to get caught up in the trend of the day and miss the big picture. The big picture is that cloud computing disrupts the data center world by slashing the capital and skills required to deploy a web application.

If that is the big prize, then most of what passes for news in cloud computing is more along the lines of "me speak cloud too."

Today, cloud development and deployment is still the exclusive domain of highly paid web experts and just as highly paid hosting providers and systems administrators. As much as cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace have done to simplify web hosting and eliminate people from the equation, it still takes far too much expertise and effort to get applications built and deployed in the cloud.

The goal of cloud computing is to make web development and deployment something that any bum can do and charge in on their credit card with nary a care in the world.

With all due humility, I think RightScale and WaveMaker have taken a big step towards that goal this week, introducing an easy-to-use cloud development platform with one-click deployment to Amazon EC2 via RightScale.

It is now monkeys-on-keyboards easy to create a web application and deploy it in a secure, scalable cloud environment using WaveMaker/RightScale and Amazon.

So who cares about this stuff anyway? How 'bout IBM and Amazon!

On Thursday, October 1, IBM and Amazon are hosting a half-day webinar entitled Cloud computing for developers: Hosted by IBM and Amazon Web Services . At that webinar, WaveMaker and RightScale will provide an online demonstration of building a web application with WaveMaker and deploying it to a WebSphere AMI using RightScale. One small click for man, one giant cloud for mankind!

Cloud Ready Computing

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 11:30:00 EDT

Cloud computing offers significant economies in deploying and managing applications. While enterprises are not yet ready to move mission-critical applications to cloud computing, CIOs and CTOs are increasingly wanting to create applications that are "cloud-ready." A cloud-ready application is based on an architecture which provides the flexibility to deploy the application to either a traditional data center or into a private or public cloud infrastructure. This flexibility ensures that enterprises can take advantage of cloud computing benefits whenever they choose.

Why VMWare Bought SpringSource

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:45:20 EDT

VMWare announced a $420M acquisition of SpringSource today. Given that SpringSource revenues are estimated to be around $20M, this acquisition was a spectacular validation that cloud computing is rearranging the development landscape.

SpringSource developed the Spring open source Java application platform. Over the last year, SpringSource also acquired the Tomcat web server and Hyperic management tools, giving them a complete platform to build, run and manage Java applications.

SpringSource shares WaveMaker's vision that the future of cloud computing belongs to open platform as a service products. Many cloud solutions today are completely proprietary, locking developers into a single vendor.

In contrast, SpringSource and WaveMaker both promote an Open Platform as a Service vision. By providing an open platform for both cloud and data center hosted applications, SpringSource and WaveMaker give developers flexibility to build and deploy applications wherever they want.

With this acquisition, VMWare will be able to optimizes the services it provides based on a better understanding of how the applications themselves are built. With cloud computing, the age of generic virtualization is coming to an end. Hosting providers who can optimize their services based on application-specific requirements will have an advantage over "application-blind" hosting providers.

As cloud computing disrupts the way applications are deployed, it is also disrupting the way applications are developed. At WaveMaker, we believe the next big step is for the development tool themselves to move into the cloud, making it possible to build and deploy applications completely from a browser.

More resources
Matt Assay's analysis of the VMWare acquisition on CNET

Rod Johnson's blog post on the VMWare acquisition of SpringSource

Survey: IBM ISV Plans for SaaS Development

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:33:00 EDT

We conducted a survey of the ISV attendees that turned up some interesting results about where ISVs are along the SaaS migration path and where they would like to be in 12 months.

We defined a SaaS maturity model with 5 levels:

Level 0: web-enabled. The ISV's application can be accessed through a web browser without requiring the end user to install anything on their desktop.
Level 1: hosted. The ISV's application can be hosted without requiring the customer to install anything in their data center.
Level 2: self-service. The end user can customize an application (e.g., configure dashboards, reports, data, workflow) without having to do any coding.
Level 3: multi-tenant. The ISV can support multiple customers with a single application, database and security instance.
Level 4: cloud scalable. The ISV can deploy their appplication within a cloud infrasctructure that automatically scales up and down based on load.

The interesting thing about this maturity model is that levels 0 - 2 are about delivering higher value to the ISVs customers, while levels 3 and 4 are about reducing costs to the ISV to scale their operations. The important take away for the ISV is that the value of levels 3 and 4 are highly sensitive to the ISVs projections about the number of customers they need to support along with the level of customization that each customer requires.

Based on this maturity model, attendees first told us where they are today. The following pie chart shows how ISVs rank the maturity of their existing products. Note that over half of the ISVs put themselves at the most basic level - web-enabled application.

Next, we asked ISVs where they would like to be in 12 months. The following pie chart shows where ISVs would like to see their product offerings in 12 months. Note that the bulk of ISVs intend to deliver self-service customization, but fewer ISVs plan on moving all the way to a multi-tenant, cloud-scalable solution over the next 12 months.

Admittedly, this survey data is more anecdotal than rigorous (there were only 35 respondents). However, it is an interesting indication that ISVs are looking for an incremental methodology for migrating their applications to SaaS, rather than a big bang approach in which the ISV does a complete rewrite of their software.

Resources:

Click here for more about IBM's SaaS enablement program
Click here for more about the SaaS maturity model

New Poster Child For Web 2.0 Self-Service

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 21:45:00 EDT

KANA announced the release of KANA 10, whose killer feature is the ability for call center executives to do self-service customization of call center workflow to meet changing business requirements. KANA is using a customized version of WaveMaker studio that allows call center execs to configure the business workflow using a drag and drop interface. KANA 10 shrinks a process that used to take months down to minutes - all thanks to WaveMaker! According to KANA's CTO, Mark Angel, "WaveMaker's visual Ajax studio turbocharged our web development effort for KANA 10, cutting at least 50 percent of our UI development time compared to a standard Ajax library."

Another SaaS Migration Success For WaveMaker

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:45:00 EDT

In addition to growing sales by a whopping 80% last quarter (worthy of another blog post on its own no doubt), WaveMaker also brought on a number of impressive new customers.

Yesterday we announced that the ECN Group subsidiary of New Zealand Post has adopted WaveMaker as their platform for delivery the next generation of their Round Trip Logistics application. ECN has over 3,000 customers and sells their SaaS logistics application throughout New Zealand, Australia and Asian markets.

WaveMaker makes SaaS simple both for SaaS vendors and their customers:

SaaS migration: like many ISVs, ECN already has a good deal of application business logic written in Java. WaveMaker allows ECN to create a new SaaS application that leverages the work they have already done.
SaaS development: just like we did with KANA 10, WaveMaker's drag and drop development platform can cut the time to develop a new SaaS application by at least 50%
SaaS end-user customization: WaveMaker's unique strength is in enabling SaaS vendors to deliver applications that can be easily customized by end users. In KANA's case, this meant enabling business managers to react to changing business conditions by customizing workflows in minutes that would otherwise take months of expert IT resources.

WaveMaker's SaaS development platform shows ISVs how to build a SaaS application using an incremental approach that delivers the highest bang for the buck. Other solutions like Force.com require that ISVs completely redevelop their application - a more costly and risky approah.

Big Hairy Severed Jugulars - and other secrets of marketing new software products

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:37:32 EDT

While our engineering team works feverishly on the Beta 2 release of WaveMaker for the cloud (with intermittent breaks for foosball), I am wrestling with how to explain what our product does and why anyone should care.

Let's face it - small, innovative tech companies are a dime a dozen. When we ask potential customers to literally bet their careers on our latest shiny gizmo, there had better be a pretty compelling reward to offset that risk.

With that in mind, I am creating a marketing pitch to overcome customer's innate skepticism by answering three basic questions:

What is the severed jugular customer pain point? The first step is to identify a customer problem that you can solve and that customers really care about. Solving an annoying problem works for established vendors (kind of), but absolutely will not get a new vendor in the door. The marketing pitch has to solve a top 3 problem where the customer believes "if I don't get this resolved my job is on the line."
What is a unique selling proposition? Connected directly to the pain point, you have to define exactly what unique benefit the customer can only get from your product. The important point here is that there is a single unique value that you will put first and foremost in front of the customer.
What is our company's big hairy audacious goal? Even if a customer has a huge pain poing and sees the value of your unique selling proposition, they will only buy if they think you will be around long enough to solve their problem. In this case, "solve their problem" means that the customer gets so much glory for choosing your product that they get promoted (at which point it's the next guy's problem ;-). Creating a big vision for your tiny company is a powerful way to give your customer confidence that your product is around for the long haul.

This of course sounds more formulaic than it actually is, but at a minimum provides some good questions to ask when evaluating a marketing pitch. Stay tuned for WaveMaker for the cloud's answers to these questions!

Data Access for RIAs

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:22:00 EDT

ZapThink just produced a good report on the state of Web 2.0 tools entitled "Evolution of the Rich Internet Applcation Market." In the report, Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmelzer of Zapthink highlight a critical gap in most RIA solutions: the inability to access data from within the UI. They then point to this as a major source of competitive advantage for Adobe

Twitter is AIM for adults

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:46:04 EDT

At the monthly NVMDA* last night, the topic turned (as all tech topics do these days) to Twitter.

What those of us with teenagers reported is that Twitter is a complete non-phenomenon for the otherwise technologically-obsessed younger generation.

Our conclusion was that Twitter is most exciting for people who don't use instant messaging. To be sure, Twitter != AIM and vice versa, but Twitter provokes a fascination with instant communication among older geeks that younger geeks like my son experience every day via text messaging.

Not that this necessarily spells any sort of dire outcome for Twitter, just that it is unlikely to replace SMS as the communication vehicle of choice for the next generation of computer jocks.

* Noe Valley Men's Drinking Association, a poorly, but aptly named group of thirsty gentlemen.

Oops, my inner nerd is showing

Fri, 22 May 2009 12:39:20 EDT

With the release of WaveMaker 5.0, I rolled up my sleeves, got out my pocket slide rule for moral support, and dove into tech-topia.

The result was two very geeky articles:

Automating Hibernate Mappings and Queries with WaveMaker published in TheServerSide this week. Describes how WaveMaker can automate the process of building Java applications that have relational back ends and web clients.
Fixing Ajax Back Buttons and Bookmarks with Dojo published in DojoCampus. Addresses the issues around getting the browser back button to work with Ajax web clients, as well as how to implement standard url bookmarks with Ajax.

Both articles were well received - even the notoriously testy ServerSide crowd was well behaved.

The down side, of course, is that programming plays to my built in compulsive/addictive personality, so I find myself waking at 2am with my brain working on some minute programming problem in full throttle.

Five Free Mashup Tools You Should Know About

Sat, 09 May 2009 14:00:00 EDT

Do you want to create a visual dashboard from existing widgets? Try a front-end mashup tool. These tools make it easy to create a personal dashboard that tracks your stocks, local weather, the time in 51 timezones and the current price of titanium.

WaveMaker 5 Cuts Java Web Development Time 90%

Mon, 04 May 2009 12:35:22 EDT

Today, we launched version 5 of our visual development platform for Java and web developers.

Java developers need the equivalent of MS Access for building Java Web Applications. Currently, a Java developer wanting to build a web application faces a huge learning curve, to say nothing of the coding burden.

WaveMaker 5 addresses the need for easy to use tools for building Java Web Applications. Wavemaker 5 introduces Enterprise-ready Data Widgets. WaveMaker generates these custom components automatically when a developer connects to a database.

With Enterprise-ready Data Widgets, WaveMaker reads the database schema and creates a widget for each table that the developer can drag and drop into an application. Enterprise-ready Data Widgets can display table data as an Ajax grid or as a form with automatic data validation and built in create, update and delete capabilities.

WaveMaker makes it possible for a developer to create a database-driven web application with literally three clicks:

Click 1: connect to the database. WaveMaker studio automatically imports the schema and creates an Enterprise-ready Data Widget for each database table.
Click 2: drag Enterprise-ready Data Widget from the studio palette to the application canvas
Click 3: press Run to perform a test run of the application in a local Tomcat server. The final application can deploy to any Java server.

Try it today! You can download WaveMaker and try it yourself here.

WaveMaker Weathers The Storm

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:45:20 EDT

In my various swims around the San Francisco bay, there have been times - thankfully only a few - when the combination of waves and tide seemed too powerful to overcome. Luckily, I have yet to get swept out under the Golden Gate bridge.

In a similar way, there have been economic times - again only a few - when the combination of customer caution and investor panic seemed overwhelming. Through Q4 and Q1, our strategy was to hunker down, dig deep and do our best.

As it turned out, doing our best and not losing focus was enough to help WaveMaker grow revenue through the last six months. More importantly, we are closing in on our goal of profitability for the second half of the year.

In my experience, startup companies always seem incredibly fragile, but are actually pretty resilient. Of course, it helps to be solving a pressing problem in a growing part of the market ;-)!

I am particularly excited about our upcoming WaveMaker 5 release this month. This release sets a new gold standard for ease of use: you can build and deploy a complete, database-driven web application in just 3 mouse clicks!

Here are some of the continuing signs that WaveMaker has the current in its favor:

Huge ROI Proof: Judith Hurwitz wrote a report as part of IBM's SaaS Enablement practice, showing how using WaveMaker can lower SaaS TCO by 75%
IBM Partnership: WaveMaker is providing integration tools for IBM's LotusLive, for example adding SalesForce and LinkedIn contacts to the LotusLive dashboard.
Agile Services Launch: WaveMaker now has its own crack services team. Need a web solution built quickly and cost-effectively? Call us!

Here's hoping that the worst of the economic storm is behind us and that smoother waters lie ahead.

Opening Up Platform as a Service - What is Open PaaS?

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:28:51 EDT

Platform as a Service (PaaS) offers a way to build and deploy applications entirely in the cloud. This market was pioneered by SalesForce and their Force.com PaaS offering.

PaaS offers the potential to democratize web development by enabling anyone who can use a browser to assemble and extend web-based applications. Yet early PaaS players, including Force.com, Bungee Labs, Google AppEngine and Microsoft's Azure, have introduced PaaS solutions that are remarkably proprietary.

A proprietary PaaS solution introduces high switching costs to move data or logic from one PaaS provider to another. For example, moving an application from the recently deceased Coghead to AppEngine would require a wholesale rewrite of an application written on one proprietary framework to another.

In short, customers adopting PaaS gain access to powerful new technical capabilities but at the cost of stepping back to the proprietary business models of 20 years ago. Surely the same market forces that have driven greater transparency in the enterprise software world will also prevail in the brave new world of cloud computing!

In talking with customers and analysts, WaveMaker has introduced the term Open PaaS to describe what the next generation of cloud development tools should look like. In our definition, Open PaaS solutions have four characteristics:

Portable - customers must be able to run applications built using PaaS tools on multiple cloud offerings. PaaS offerings based on proprietary languages (e.g., SalesForce, Bungee, Coghead) lock customers into a single cloud provider.
Based on open standards - customers must be able to leverage existing skills such as Java and Javascript to build applications using a PaaS tool. Offerings that are based on proprietary software stacks (e.g., Google AppEngine, Microsoft Azure) lock customers into a single cloud infrastructure.
Available as open source - customers must be able to run applications created with PaaS in their own data center in an open source environment . SugarCRM pioneered the attractive concept of letting the customer "take their ball and go home." For PaaS vendors, it is even more important that customers be able to move a cloud app from the cloud to behind their firewall.
Mobile-aware - increasingly, web enablement reaches beyond the desktop browser to smartphones from companies like Apple, RIM and Palm. Customers need PaaS tools that can deliver device-appropriate content and functionality. Effectively, this is an update of the old Java "write once run anywhere" mantra.

As the cloud evolves, it is inevitable that customers will demand more flexibility. With that in mind, WaveMaker recently became a supporter of the Open Cloud Manifesto, a very timely effort spearheaded by Reuven Cohen, CTO of Enomaly.

You can read the Open Cloud Manifesto here, but here is my take on the 6 principles of the Open Cloud Manifesto (the bold titles and italic comments are mine):

Commit to cloud interoperability: Cloud providers should collaborate to solve standard problems (e.g., security, interoperability) in a standard way. At a minimum, this requires publishing the APIs needed to build interoperable security and other services across cloud providers.
Eschew vendor lockin: Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms. This goes to the heart of the problem. If you are at the head of the pack, why slow down and let others catch you? The answer can only be because doing so gives you access to a much bigger market, of which you are still at the head of the pack but with a smaller lead!
Adopt existing standards aggressively: Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. This will be much easier for new cloud vendors, who are starting from scratch, than existing cloud vendors, who built out their infrastructure before many of these standards existed.
Minimize proliferation of new standards: When new standards are needed, Cloud vendors must be judicious to avoid creating too many standards. We must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it. This shows great wisdom in the ways of the world. What are most standards bodies anyway but the effect to gain or preserve market share by non-market driven means?
Focus new standards on actual customer needs: Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs. This is another swipe at the self-serving approaches of many standards bodies. From a cynical perspective, we will know cloud computing is successful when its standards bodies become just as opaque and non-customer focused as other entrenched standards like Java ;-)
Cooperate between standards groups: Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap. This is well-intentioned, but also seems to be saying "thou shalt have no cloud advocacy groups before me" (shouldn't that be commandment I?)

Just like that large collection of tubes called the Internet, this notion of Open Cloud and Open Platforms is here to stay!

What Is Platform as a Service (PaaS)?

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:33:45 EDT

There are a number of companies offering Platform as a Service (PaaS), but little agreement about what PaaS is or how to compare various PaaS offerings from companies ranging from SalesForce to WaveMaker. Even the Wikipedia entry on PaaS starts with a stern warning that the entry is full of buzzwords and lacking in concrete examples.

Definition of PaaS

PaaS solutions are development platforms for which the development tool itself is hosted in the cloud and accessed through a browser. With PaaS, developers can build web applications without installing any tools on their computer and then deploy those applications without any specialized systems administration skills.

McKinsey & Company, in their 2008 report "Emerging Platform Wars," defined Platform as a service as "cloud based IDEs that not only incorporate traditional programming languages but include tools for mashup-based development."

What Makes PaaS Different?

The alternative to PaaS is to develop web applications using desktop development tools like Eclipse or Microsoft Access, then manually deploy those applications to a cloud hosting provider such as Amazon EC2.

PaaS platforms also have functional differences from traditional development platforms. These include:

Multi-tenant development tool: traditional development tools are single user - a cloud-based studio must support multiple users, each with multiple active projects.
Multi-tenant deployment architecture: scalability is often not a concern of the initial development effort and is left instead for the sys admins to deal with when the project deploys. In PaaS, scalability of the application and data tiers must be built-in (e.g., load balancing, failover need to be basic elements of the dev platform itself).
Integrated management: traditional development solution usually do not concern themselves with runtime monitoring , but in PaaS, the monitoring ability needs to be baked into the development platform.
Integrated billing: PaaS offerings require mechanisms for billing based on usage that are unique to the SaaS world.

Faux PaaS - 4 Ways To Tell If It's Really PaaS

At a minimum, a PaaS solution should include the following elements:

Browser-based development studio - if you have to install something on your computer to develop applications, that's not PaaS!
Seamless deployment to hosted runtime environment - ideally, a developer should be able to deploy a PaaS application with one click. If you have to talk to a person to get your app deployed, that's not PaaS!
Management and monitoring tools - while cloud-based solutions are very cost effective, they can be tricky to manage and scale without good tools. If you have to bolt on DIY monitoring to scale your cloud app, that's not PaaS!
Pay as you go billing - avoiding upfront costs has made PaaS popular. If you can't pay with your credit card based on usage, that's not PaaS!

Benefits of PaaS

The benefits of PaaS lie in greatly increasing the number of people who can develop, maintain and deploy web applications. In short, PaaS offers to democratize development of web applications much the same way that Microsoft Access democratized development of client/server applica

Today, building web applications requires expert developer with three, highly specialized skill sets:

Back end server development (e.g., Java/J2EE)
Front end client development (e.g., Javascript/Dojo)
Web site administration.

PaaS offers the potential for general developers to build web applications without needing specialized expertise. This allows an entire generation of MS Access, Lotus Notes and PowerBuilder developers to start building web applications without the huge learning curve.

PaaS Resources

Examples of PaaS solutions today include:

AppEngine from Google: based on Python and Django
Force.com from SalesForce: based on the SalesForce SaaS infrastructure and Apex language
Bungee Connect: visual development studio based on Java
LongJump: based on Java/Eclipse
WaveMaker: visual development studio based on Java and hosted on Amazon EC2

Other definitions for Paas are offered by Bungee, Salesforce and ZDNet.

How to create an unbelievable amount of buzz

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:06:08 EDT

We were briefing a senior architect at one of our partners last week when he commented, "you know, for a company of your size, you generate an unbelievable amount of buzz." In the same week, we were flattered to have a competitor draft a lengthy blog post that listed all the reasons they were better than WaveMaker.

From the inside, it always feels like things are moving too slowly, but from the outside, clearly WaveMaker is, well, creating liquid oscillations.

Later on today, I am presenting to a group of Haas MBAs on the topics of innovation and entrepreneurship. So with my professorial hat on (and continuing my series on open source marketing metrics), here is my best guess at a stepwise approach to building buzz:

Go open source to get into the game. It is amazing to me how many SaaS and cloud companies are still playing the old, proprietary enterprise software game. I believe that open source is the only viable technology channel today - without this, building buzz is almost impossible. Coghead was the latest victim of the proprietary software strategy, despite launching the first, easy-to-use cloud development platform. iPhone is a good counter-example, but Apple is a special case of a company that has always gotten away with murder because of their fanatic base of developers.
Feed your community to build a fan base. Without an open source product, I would argue that it is almost impossible to create a self-sufficient community. Communities don't grow by themselves, though. It takes dedicated resources to nurture a community into a real advocate for your product.
Blog your vision. Blogs provide a platform for entering into a dialogue (or at least a protracted monologue) about where the market is going. It creates a way to engage with the community and draw new people to the community. For the last 6 months, the Keeneview blog has always been the number 2 or 3 source of new downloads for WaveMaker.
Twitter your tactics. Twitter provides an instant gratification approach to discussing the latest tactical nuances of your strategy. My Twitter account is where I make short, cryptic pronouncements for the benefit of all my ADHD friends.
Carpet bomb your successes. Whenever anything good happens, I make sure the world knows about it. This includes not just spamming my own social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, dZone, delicious, stumbleupon) but also reaching out to all the other bloggers out there who are always looking for validation points around their own vision. For example, each time I make a blog post, I send emails to a dozen or so bloggers who I think will be most interested in it, thereby getting a multiplier effect.
Brief analysts to confirm your victories. Analysts like Judith Hurwitz, Michael Cote at Redmonk, Mark Driver at Gartner and John Rymer at Forrester are critical for getting the word out, but I see their role as fast followers, not leaders of market momentum. Once you have enough proof points among bleeding edge adopters, the analysts can connect the dots for more mainstream adoption, not to mention perform major messaging tune-ups!

I'm not guaranteeing these techniques will work for everyone, but they should help get you on your way to "unbelievable" buzz!

How To Lose The Codies

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:29:54 EST

The open source world has been very, very good to WaveMaker. We have a thriving online community, and through our community we have attracted customers like Cisco and Macy's, along with partners like IBM and KANA.

The open source world thrives on transparency and trust - a potent combination.

Yet every so often we get tempted to go back to the bad old proprietary world where decisions are made based on opacity and who you know.

With jaw-dropping naivete, I paid $1,100 to an organization called the Software Information Industry Association (www.siia.com) in order to participate in their Codies awards contest.

I was snowed by the idea that the SIIA's crack panel of judges performs thorough evaluations on scores of software products to glean "the best of the best." Unfortunately, the reality was much more mundane.

I don't know what process the winners go through, but I have detailed knowledge of the process for Codie losers. To help you save over $1,000 ($850 membership + $250 contest fee), I will share this process with you:

Process For Losing the Codie Awards [Guaranteed to Work]

Pay $1,100 (very important!)
Get assigned a judge (up to you to set up a meeting!)
Set up a meeting
Reschedule meeting when judge fails to show up for meeting
Repeat steps 3-5 until contest is over
Receive written evaluation from judge which demonstrates that they make up in chutzpah what they lack in integrity

In our case, the "judge" was Paul Cohen, who certainly didn't take off any time from his job at the Beverly Hills public schools on our behalf. His evaluation was that WaveMaker is a "very pricey set of web controls." It doesn't take great technical expertise to observe that this is an odd description of an open source, web-base IDE.

Ah, I thought. The Codie awards manager, Lisa Mitchell will help! After all, she helped arrange the meeting with the judge and knows that the promised meeting never happened. Not surprisingly, she has become as difficult to reach as our judget.

But then there is that ultimate arbiter of justice, the CEO of the SIIA, Ken Wasch. Surely when he sees how egregious our case is, he will at least agree to have another judge at least look at our product. After an initial friendly call, I have heard nothing from him either.

The process for losing the Codies is very transparent. The process for winning is less so.

It's a good thing that "who you know" awards are being replaced by the voice of the open source community. Shame on me for ever doubting it!

Startling scientific discovery: little vegetable bits do not spontaneously dissolve in sink

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:18:00 EST

For those of you who feel that the life of a hard-charging Silicon Valley CEO is non-stop strategic wheeling and dealing, I submit the following internal memo for a more balanced perspective.

To: All SF Employees
From: Your chief executive officer and primary sink disposal unit
Re: Unwillingness of vegetable matter deposited in sink drain to spontaneously disappear

While I applaud the steadfast perseverance of our intrepid WaveMaker scientists, the fact remains that the bits of carrots left in the sink yesterday did not spontaneously vanish as was no doubt the plan. Nor did the peas left in the sink today.

In fact, vegetable and other materials larger than approximately the head of a pin are remarkably consistent in their reluctance to do anything but rest idly in the sink filter until some poor clod (usually me) comes by to clean them out.

In the future, you are more than welcome to conduct whatever experiments you want in the comfort of your own home. However, in our shared kitchen I would appreciate an approach of "nothing but water down the drain."

Thank you for your kind attention.

- chris

Good Guys - Dropping Like Flies

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:43:20 EST

Sean Kerner just reported that MySQL president Marten Mickos is leaving Sun. I can't imagine worse news for Sun's efforts to buy a seat at the table for the next generation of computing.

MySQL pioneered the open source business model and is emerging as a key player in cloud computing. It borders on tragic that Sun is unable to inspire and retain executives like Marten.

I had a lunch yesterday with a good friend who is studying innovation. We compared innovation at Sun with innovation at Apple.

In 2000, both Sun and Apple got hit hard. Apple famously recovered. Sun, only somewhat less famously, did not.

Nobody claims that Sun engineers stopped innovating after 2000. It is clear, however, that Sun's management has been ineffective in harnessing that innovation to create a successful business strategy.

I got to know Marten when my last company, Persistence Software, was purchased by Progress Software. Progress was in a huge food fight with MySQL about who owned the MySQL trademark in the US - it's long story (complete with Marten being arrested by a Sherriff at the Progress headquarters), but Marten won.

Marten Mickos proved that he has what it takes to turn innovation into business success. He clearly believes that he can be more successful innovating outside of Sun than within.

If Cloud Computing Were a Child, It Would Be An Angry Two Year Old

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:00:00 EST

Mark also pointed out some big benefits for IT with cloud computing. "The cloud enables rapid application maintenance - iterating application functionality on a daily basis." The apps can change as quickly as the business situation changes, making IT much more of a real partner in business change rather than an impediment to business change. Mark introduced the idea of a cloud development platform or platform as a service (PaaS), noting that in PaaS, the developer should never encounter the concept of a server. Instead, the platform abstracts all deployment complexity from the developer, making it ideal for business unit developers who don't have deployment resources readily at hand.

Thriving Thru Recession With Head In the Clouds

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:07:23 EST

Despite the gloomy headlines, WaveMaker is having a great year - our revenues continue to grow over 50% a quarter and we launched a partnership with IBM at last week's Lotusphere. InfoWorld continues to sing WaveMaker's praises as well.

The worldwide recession is sort of like a giant avalanche, sweeping startups and industry titans alike before its path. Having a leadership position in a rapidly growing market like cloud computing is a way to not only survive the recession but come out stronger on the other end.

Benjamin Thompkins has a good post on the bmighty blog about cloud computing as the ultimate recession-proof technology. Here are my top 3 recommendations for surviving today's economic avalanche:

Stay ahead of the destruction - with the economy collapsing, the only safe place is in a market that is growing enough to dampen the blow.
Don't waver in your path - survival mode is all about executing - finding ways to bring in as much revenue as possible on the path you are on. Changing course while the avalanche is bearing down on you is corporate suicide.
Have friend who can help dig you out - when the going gets tough, you soon find out what kind of investor support you have. All VCs are easy to work with when times are good - it is the behavior of VCs in the bad times that separates the bankers from the builders

IBM Gets Seriously Social with WaveMaker

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:59:01 EST

WaveMaker shared the stage this week with LinkedIn, SalesForce and Skype at IBM's launch of their new collaboration platform, LotusLive. Appropriately enough for a new entrant in the Serious Social market, Lotus Live launched at the Disneyworld resort in Orlando.

Clint Boulton of eWeek had a good description of LotusLive:

"LotusLive is the brand name for meeting, messaging and collaboration applications IBM intends to deliver to partners, who will in turn put them in front of their customers as a SAAS (software as a service) platform this year"

Sean Poulley, the Vice President of Collaboration Services, was the emcee for the very entertaining LotusLive launch presentation (it's not often that you see Crocodile Dundee used to promote cloud collaboration).

After producing a great deal of vapor around the somewhat suspect term Web 2.0 and the even more dodgy term Enterprise 2.0, IBM and LotusLive are finally validating the premise that social networking will be as powerful a force in the enterprise as it has been for the consumer world.

WaveMaker's 15 minutes of fame came via a Social Network Integrator application that we built for LotusLive. Social Network Integrator allows LotusLive users to share files with contacts from any of their social networks (LinkedIn, Salesforce, etc).

Underneath the covers, WaveMaker's Social Network Integrator application was hosted on Amazon EC2, using Rightscale for cloud scaling and Kapow to access contact data from LinkedIn.