By Christopher Keene 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. Alt... Oct. 4, 2011 12:43 PM EDT Reads: 1,071 |
By Christopher Keene 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 fac... Sep. 1, 2011 07:07 PM EDT Reads: 372 |
By Christopher Keene 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 its... Aug. 25, 2011 03:05 PM EDT Reads: 380 |
By Christopher Keene 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... Aug. 18, 2011 03:21 PM EDT Reads: 366 |
By Christopher Keene  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."... Jul. 28, 2011 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 2,451 |
By Christopher Keene 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 ... Jun. 2, 2011 07:57 PM EDT Reads: 401 |
By Christopher Keene 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 cloudvmc login // login to cloudvmc push // run your app in the cloudThree commands and the (clou... Apr. 18, 2011 08:19 PM EDT Reads: 795 |
By Christopher Keene 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 ... Apr. 13, 2011 01:41 PM EDT Reads: 1,172 |
By Christopher Keene 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) ta... Apr. 5, 2011 01:52 PM EDT Reads: 277 |
By Christopher Keene 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 ... Mar. 8, 2011 12:15 PM EST Reads: 444 |
By Christopher Keene Nov. 30, 2010 02:22 PM EST Reads: 2,761 |
By Christopher Keene  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 n... Jul. 14, 2010 07:45 PM EDT Reads: 2,332 |
By Christopher Keene  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).
... Jul. 8, 2010 07:08 PM EDT Reads: 2,860 |
By Christopher Keene 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... Jun. 24, 2010 05:47 PM EDT Reads: 478 |
By Christopher Keene 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 Micros... May. 28, 2010 07:05 PM EDT Reads: 669 |
By Christopher Keene 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 com... May. 13, 2010 03:37 PM EDT Reads: 589 |
By Christopher Keene  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... Mar. 29, 2010 05:45 PM EDT Reads: 4,083 |
By Christopher Keene  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 de... Feb. 13, 2010 02:25 PM EST Reads: 4,355 |
By Christopher Keene  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 ... Jan. 8, 2010 11:30 AM EST Reads: 3,714 |
By Christopher Keene  With full credit to the Geek and Poke blog, the funniest nerd cartoon I have seen all year!
Dec. 14, 2009 08:30 PM EST Reads: 3,326 |
By Christopher Keene  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! Roughl... Dec. 10, 2009 04:00 PM EST Reads: 4,648 |
By Christopher Keene  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 wav... Nov. 25, 2009 06:56 PM EST Reads: 3,039 |
By Christopher Keene  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 ... Nov. 19, 2009 01:00 PM EST Reads: 3,996 |
By Christopher Keene 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 automat... Nov. 4, 2009 03:06 PM EST Reads: 1,232 |
By Christopher Keene  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 t... Oct. 16, 2009 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 5,499 |
By Christopher Keene  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... Oct. 2, 2009 09:00 AM EDT Reads: 4,186 |
By Christopher Keene  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 ... Sep. 24, 2009 10:00 AM EDT Reads: 3,588 |
By Christopher Keene  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... Sep. 18, 2009 05:15 AM EDT Reads: 4,586 |
By Christopher Keene  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 appl... Aug. 28, 2009 11:30 AM EDT Reads: 5,004 |
By Christopher Keene 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 a... Aug. 11, 2009 02:45 PM EDT Reads: 679 |
By Christopher Keene  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 ... Jul. 23, 2009 03:33 PM EDT Reads: 2,129 |
By Christopher Keene  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... Jul. 20, 2009 09:45 PM EDT Reads: 3,411 |
By Christopher Keene 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... Jul. 9, 2009 08:45 PM EDT Reads: 3,170 |
By Christopher Keene 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.... Jun. 25, 2009 04:37 PM EDT Reads: 515 |
By Christopher Keene  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. ... Jun. 8, 2009 07:22 AM EDT Reads: 9,767 |
By Christopher Keene 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 e... Jun. 4, 2009 07:46 PM EDT Reads: 483 |
By Christopher Keene 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 WaveMa... May. 22, 2009 12:39 PM EDT Reads: 629 |
By Christopher Keene 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 o... May. 4, 2009 12:35 PM EDT Reads: 718 |
By Christopher Keene 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 -... Apr. 22, 2009 08:45 PM EDT Reads: 652 |
By Christopher Keene 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 ... Apr. 8, 2009 09:28 PM EDT Reads: 1,070 |
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. 
