The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

Another SaaS Migration Success For WaveMaker

2009-07-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

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.

KANA 10 - New Poster Child For Web 2.0 Self-Service

2009-07-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, 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."

The following screenshot shows an agent dashboard built using WaveMaker and based on the Dojo Toolkit. Pretty snazzy huh?

The following screen is intended for end user self service and gives proof positive that Web 2.0 has entered the enterprise!

KANA 10 was built using WaveMaker and the IBM SOA Foundation and was developed in conjunction with IBM customers. KANA did a complete rewrite of their entire suite of applications in less than a year (we announced the WaveMaker/KANA deal 10 months ago)- a terrific validation for Web 2.0, the Dojo Toolkit, Ajax and SOA technologies.

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

2009-06-25T13:23:00.000-07:00

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 point 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!

Twitter is AIM for adults

2009-06-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-22T09:30:00.000-07:00

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.

The Missing Link - Data Access for RIAs

2009-05-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

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:

"Adobe stands alone as the only vendor who offers a commercial, RIA-specific data access product."

It is probably not completely fair to expect Zapthink to include in last week's report a product that was released last week, this is exactly the problem that WaveMaker 5 solves with Enterprise-ready Data Widgets. In fact, the similarities between Adobe and WaveMaker's solutions is startling:

Comparison of RIA Data Frameworks

The Zapthink report concludes by saying that the most attractive market opportunity is not for stand-alone RIA libraries but for full RIA development enviroments like Adobe LiveCycle, Microsoft Silverlight and WaveMaker.

Five Free Mashup Tools You Should Know About

2009-05-08T11:15:00.000-07:00

Mashups is a pretty broad term. A good definition for a mashup tool is a solution that allows developers to combine interesting data and then visualize that data through a web application

Usually, mashups are web applications that can be created quickly using standard web services (e.g., REST) and components (e.g., Widgets).

There are three kinds of Mashup tools: front end, back end and integrated. The differences are:

Front end mashup tools: these tools help build web front ends like dashboards using widgets/gadgets and little to no programming (iGoogle, PageFlakes)
Back end mashup tools: these tools combine web-accessible data and services into more useful web services that can be called easily using a REST-ful interface (Kapow, Yahoo pipes)
Integrated mashup tools: these tools make it easy to build end-to-end web applications that link web widgets to data and services.

When evaluating mashup tools, you need to think about what kind of mashing you are trying to do:

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.
Are you wanting to turn web-accessible stuff (like ebay auctions or linkedin contacts) into a web service API? Try a back-end mashup tool to get at data programmatically that you otherwise have to do by hand (and mouse).
Do you need to create an end-to-end web app like a dashboard or simple business portal? Try an integrated mashup tool to build applications quickly and with minimal programming. Integrated mashup tools are effectively the modern version of MS Access for the web.

Another factor to consider is whether you have to download and install anything to use it. Mashup tools can be purely web-based (like Yahoo pipes or PageFlakes), purely download (Open Kapow) or available both as a download or hosted (like WaveMaker and IBM Mashup Center, both of which are hosted on Amazon EC/2).

Here are five free, open source mashup solutions you might want to check out:

iGoogle - Front End Mashup Screen Builder Tool

If you are looking for lots and lots of widgets, look no further. iGoogle has tens of thousands of gadgets (many of the most popular ones NSFW, but that's how it goes). Try iGoogle here.

Open Kapow - Back End Mashup Service Builder

The web is a wonderful place to find information, if you are a human and have a lot of time. Getting programmatic access to data on the web is a completely different story (wouldn't it be nice to see which of your favorite restaurants has a table open at 6 tonight automatically?) Kapow is a web-based tool for creating "robots" that gather data on the web and return the results as a web service. Try open Kapow here.

Yahoo Pipes - Back End Mashup Service Builder

Pipes is a web-based tool that allows developers to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. It is not as full-featured as Kapow, but you can try it without having to download anything. Try Yahoo pipes here.

IBM Mashup Center - Integrated Mashup Builder

Mashup Center was written with the non-developer in mind. That design objective increases the number of people who can use the tool, but limits the complexity of what you can build. In general, Mashup center requires that developers create a set of enterprise widgets (using IBM's iWidget spec) . There is also a cloud version of Mashup Center, but it requires that you have your own Amazon account set up. Try Mashup Center here.

WaveMaker Studio- Integrated Mashup Builder

WaveMaker provides a fast and easy way to build web applications. It targets Java developers who want a RAD GUI builder as well as novice web developers who want to build web applications with minimal learning curve. You can try the cloud version of WaveMaker here, or try the WaveMaker download here.

WaveMaker 5 Cuts Java Web Development Time 90%

2009-05-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-22T17:39:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-04-08T10:18:00.000-07:00

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)?

2009-03-18T17:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-16T14:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-11T17:09:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-06T13:29:00.001-08:00

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.

Thriving Thru Recession With Head In the Clouds

2009-01-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-22T10:37:00.000-08:00

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.

Adobe Plays Catchup to WaveMaker...Again!

2009-01-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

Savio Rodriguez has a nice post on the Infoworld blog, entitled Adobe follows WaveMaker's footsteps into the cloud, describing Adobe's latest cloud announcement as a reaction to the WaveMaker Cloud launch last December.

According to ZDNet's Larry Dignan, Adobe is launching a cloud version of their LiveCycle tools running on Amazon EC/2 as a "sandbox" for developers. In contrast, the WaveMaker Cloud development tools are intended for full application development and deployment - out of the sandbox and onto the beach!

WaveMaker is turning out to have much more of a lead in this space than we expected. When we started development almost 2 years ago, we assumed that there would be a number of open development tools targeting the cloud.

Now that we are well into our beta release, we are finding that WaveMaker is more unique than we had hoped for. All the major players who launched before us - Force.com, Coghead, Bungee - have gone down the old fashioned proprietary path.

For customers, this is a lock-in nightmare:

Proprietary languages like Apex force developers to start fresh on yet another language and framework learning curve.

Lack of portability across cloud providers forces companies to pay monopoly pricing to host on a single cloud.

Lack of portability between the cloud and the data center limits the kind of applications companies are willing to put in the cloud.

The result is that any SaaS company that is looking for cloud-based development tools is looking at WaveMaker as a very attractive way to extend their platform. WaveMaker is an open and portable version of the Force.com tools that have helped make SalesForce the 500 pound gorilla of the SaaS world.

KANA was the first major software vendor to use WaveMaker as the customer-facing dev tool for their call center platform. Stay tuned for our next big partner announcement in the coming week!

Complexity Kills: SOA = CORBA 2.0 = DOA

2009-01-07T10:43:00.000-08:00

Anne Thomas Manes of the Burton Group has declared the death of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). Like CORBA before it, SOA was a vendor-driven "market" of daunting complexity. Also like CORBA before it, SOA collapsed under the weight of its own learning curve.

I attended the Gartner architecture conference last month, where 1,000 corporate architects gathered to discuss the state of SOA. The conversation was dominated by architects quizzing each other on what SOA really meant and whether any of them had really implemented it yet. That is scary for a technology that is long in the tooth from a buzz cycle perspective.

There was exactly 1 presentation I saw that presented a strong business case for the SOA architecture. That was by the CIO of National City Bank, which was recently bought by PNC and whose SOA architecture may or may not survive the acquisition.

Anne Thomas Manes also points out that while the heavyweight SOA architecture is falling out of favor, lightweight architectures based on SaaS and cloud services are on the rise. WaveMaker and other platform as a service (PaaS) vendors are delivering increased flexibility and productivity without the huge upfront investment of SOA.

Here is why SOA died and how the more flexible cloud services approach is winning:

SOA blew the elevator pitch. Just explaining what SOA is takes longer than the average business manager's attention span. Like spinach, business sponsors are assured that SOA is "good for you." In contrast, the value of building cloud-based apps that work like Facebook and iGoogle is easy to convey, because business sponsors (or their kids) use useful web apps all the time.
SOA was more about vendor enrichment than customer enrichment. I would argue that the SOA market was driven by the need for application server vendors to find add-on products that they could charge for once JBoss and Spring took the money out of the core app server market. In contrast, cloud services are growing organically as companies like SalesForce and WaveMaker make cloud development tools available that enable architects to build business applications based on best practices drawn from successful consumer sites like gmail and facebook.
SOA swims against the tide of IT democratization. In retrospect, many companies that adopted SOA did so as a way for core IT to maintain control over every single computing event that occurs within an enterprise. In contrast, SaaS and cloud computing break the IT monopoly on compute cycles and deliver compelling cost and time to market benefits to the business.

Just as with CORBA, SOA introduced some useful concepts around enterprise integration and service reuse. However, just as Web 1.0 killed CORBA by introducing a much easier way to distribute applications, Web 2.0 has killed SOA with a much easier way to integrate web services.

The Cloud Is Angry and Other Lessons From Gartner

2008-12-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

I attended the Gartner Application Development Conference this week and drank from the proverbial firehouse as Gartner analysts presented their vision for cloud computing

Anthony Bradley, the Web 2.0 analyst for Gartner, beat the drum for front end tools (mashup builders) to complement back end SOA systems. His take was "mashups take the benefits of SOA and make them visible to users - mashups are the face of SOA."

Mark Driver, the open source software analyst for Gartner, said that cloud computing is early in its maturity cycle. He said, "if the cloud were a child, it would be an angry two year old. The challenge for the industry now is how to make it through the terrible twos."

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.

According to Gartner, the important criteria for a cloud development platform include:

Interoperability: how well does the platform integrate with other web assets like open id and google maps?
Collaboration: how well does the platform support source code control and social programming (Facebook meets SVN)
RIA & mobile clients: cross browser and cross smart-phone support. According to Mark, reach wins over richness - supporting more browsers is more important than supporting more widgets.
Legacy: ability to integrate with enterprise data, security and web services
Performance: ability to scale significantly with no additional effort/programming
Longevity: the market momentum of the platform vendor - will they be around in 3 years? The winner will be less about the raw technology and more about the quality of partners and customers the vendor has attracted.

This is a particularly interesting list for us at WaveMaker, as we just released the WaveMaker cloud development platform that does quite well against Gartner's list. In particular, WaveMaker scores highly interoperability, both of component and of applications. WaveMaker is the first cloud development platform to offer portability between the cloud and the data center.

Gartner believes that the market for cloud development tools is very similar to the 4GL market of the early 90s. They see many innovative vendors today offering unique/proprietary solutions, thinning out over the next three years to a handful of winners. Naturally we are doing everything we can to make sure that WaveMaker is one of those winners!

WaveMaker Launches First Open-Source IDE for the Cloud

2008-12-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

The biggest problem with cloud development platforms to date has been lack of portability. For example, what if I want to move my cloud application from Coghead to some other platform? Answer - you can't.

WaveMaker changed that today by releasing the first open-source IDE for the cloud. With WaveMaker, you are no longer locked in to developing for a particular cloud. You can access our studio by downloading our open source version or access the cloud version of the studio directly (hosted on Amazon EC2).

On EC2, we are using Rightscale to manage scaling, load balancing and failover for our multi-tenant studio. We have also integrated with Elastra to provide scalable database connectivity.

Here are some things you can do with WaveMaker's cloud edition

On-site or on demand development: create applications with the open source studio (download to your desktop).
Portable cloud deployment: with one click, deploy applications to the cloud, to the desktop or to the data center.
Open source cloud IDE: migrate applications from the hosted cloud version to the free open source version whenever you want.

The WaveMaker cloud edition beta is free for development. Deployment will be through a paid Amazon machine image (AMI), with pricing starting at $0.30 per hour.

Check out the new WaveMaker cloud edition here

The Soul of the Web - Why Ajax Standards Matter

2008-11-19T08:54:00.000-08:00

I spoke on a panel at Mashup Camp this week on why Ajax Standards matter. I was quoted by Doug Henschen of Intelligent Enterprise as saying that we are locked in a struggle for the soul of the web, so I thought I would expand on that theme.

Just because the web has been open so far doesn't mean that it will stay that way. By open, I mean that content has been searchable, linkable and servable without paying fees.

Flash and Silverlight, arguably the two market-leading technology toolkits for rich media applications are not open. You cannot search Flash content, you cannot link to it and if you want to serve up flash content on your web site, you need to pay for a server license.

If the future of the web lies in rich media and if these trends continue, we may well see a very different world emerge from Web 2.0.

More importantly, Flash and Silverlight work by installing a proprietary plug-in to your browser, thus opting out of the entire browser infrastructure. If you are a plug-in vendor, your incentive is to keep the browser as dumb as possible.

The worse the underlying browser is at rendering rich widgets and media, the more developers and users will want your plug-in. If you are both the vendor of a browser (say IE) as well as the proponent of a plug-in (say Silverlight), then the incentives get truly twisted.

WaveMaker has a big stake in this debate because we chose to build our WYSIWYG development tools on top of the Dojo Toolkit. We picked Dojo because WaveMaker is targeting enterprise developers who need not just nice color pickers but also sortable and pageable grids, solid internationalization and accessibility capabilities.

Ajax standards groups like the Open Ajax Alliance (under the leadership of Jon Ferraiolo)serve a important role today in helping to highlight the differences between open solutions like Dojo and proprietary solutions. They also are helping to drive the maturity of open Ajax toolkits by focussing attention on important areas like security and internationalization.

Microsoft was the rendering engine for client/server, which paid them enormous dividends. Microsoft IE was somewhat accidentally the victor in rendering engine for Web 1.0 after Netscape fumbled their lead, although they were never really able to monitize this particular monopoly.

Make no mistake - Microsoft and Adobe aim to have their proprietary plug-ins, aka pseudo-browsers, become the rendering engines for the next generation of the Web. Without a strong push for open Ajax standards, they just might get their way.

A good day for entrepreneurs

2008-11-05T15:41:00.000-08:00

OK, ok, so this is totally off topic for a tech blog focused on the future of the web, but I just loved this graphic and couldn't resist.

Entrepreneurship is all about changing the world by thinking differently. Startups work best by challenging conventional wisdom and doing things nobody even imagined, much less thought were possible.

Yes it was a tough campaign and yes we have a number of big messes on our hands, not least of which the economic climate for technology startups. On the other hand, what a great day for America's ability to reimagine itself!

Open Source Marketing Metrics - From 0 to 700 Customers in One Year

2008-10-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

One important goal of open source software is to drive rapid adoption of a new product. Effectively, open source downloads become a marketing channel for producing qualified sales leads.

Yet there are not many metrics available by which to judge the success of an open source channel. What percent of web site visitors should download the product? What percent of downloads should register in the community? Finally, the all-important question: what percent of registered downloads should convert to paying customers?

We have been tracking downloads and conversions religiously (with lots of help from smart people like Marten Mickos at MySQL, Brian Gentile at JasperSoft, Rod Johnson at SpringSource and Andrew Aitken at the Olliance Group). I thought it would be useful to summarize what we are seeing in our community around downloads, product adoption and conversion to paying customers.

Metrics since product launch (3/08)

The punch line is that WaveMaker will have over 700 paying customers by the end of the year, both through direct community adoption and through channel partners.

29,261 web visitors per month
9,972 downloads per month (28% of visitors)
1,132 download registrations (e.g., new community members) per month (11% of downloads, 4% of visitors)
600 community postings per month (11% of downloads, 4% of visitors)
1,050 marketing leads per month
700 paying customers by 12/08 - including direct and channel customers (through OEMs)

What Drives Web visitors?

WaveMaker is an easy to use development tool for web applications. Our motto is: if you can use a browser, you can build a web app with WaveMaker. The main driver for WaveMaker web visitors is new product releases. With each new product release, the open source network springs into action via sites like SourceForge and FreshMeat, as well as specialty sites like dzone and Ajaxian.

For three weeks after a new release, we see the web site volume goes up by a factor of 5 over the previous 30 day moving average. After that, web traffic settles down to a new, higher level (typically about 20% higher than the previous moving average).

What Drives Download conversions?

The percent of web visitors who download has inched up from roughly 20% of visitors to 28% of visitors as we have gone through various iterations of our home page. As the messages have gotten simpler and the graphics more compelling, the download rates have climbed.

What Drives Community conversions?

So far, conversions from download to actually registering with the community has been our Achilles heel. One interesting metric is that the conversion rate goes down when the download volumes go up and we aren't really sure why (could be as simple as the Drupal registration engine getting backed up).

Converting Open Source Downloads to Customers

Once developers have registered with the community, they get regular newsletters and emails from our field technical people. We have found that by far the most effective marketing activity is our personal emails from field technical people to potential enterprise prospects. Instrumenting our email outreach program is another important todo for our marketing team.

These conversion numbers are pretty lumpy - a small number of channel partners can have a big impact on customer numbers, particularly at the beginning. Most of our leverage at WaveMaker has come from small systems integrators and ISVs, both of which act as channels to amplify the activity that is already being generated by our open source channel.

Summary

Converting web visitors into paying customers remains more of an art than science. What we have proven is that for enterprise software, it is possible to attract a large number of paying customers in a short time using an open source channel.

What is NOT Cloud Computing?

2008-10-23T08:44:00.001-07:00

I spoke at the Cloud Summit last week put on by M.R. Rangaswami and enjoyed as always the giddy enthusiasm with which Silicon Valley embraces each new technology wave. Cloud computing is custom made for Silicon Valley - it is poorly defined, seemingly vast and has the potential to change human life as we know it (at least for those of us who live in Silicon Valley).

Of course, we have our fair share of naysayers (like Larry and Richard), as well as theories about why those naysayers are down on cloud computing.

Since so many people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, I thought it would be useful to look not at what cloud computing is but at what cloud computing isn't.

Cloud computing is the hardware equivalent of automatic teller machines. The whole idea is that you don't have to deal with people to get your application deployed, scaled, monitored and managed. Therefore anything that gets between your application and the API to the data center in the sky is taking you away from the cloud.

The other important - and to date largely unrealized - promise of the cloud is choice, aka freedom from lock-in. Today, customers are often locked into a particular cloud provider just as surely as they are locked into their in-house data center. Moving forward, you should have the ability to change clouds providers as easily as you change cell phone providers.