Apart from core hosting, Heroku provides many of the advance features like Auto Scaling, Deployment Stacks, HTTP caching etc. The partner eco-system with add-ons like New Relic Performance Monitoring, Redis and Mongo NoSQL databases, SMS Gateways, Billing Gateways add powerful functionality to Web Applications easily.

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object relation database system. PostgreSQL is supported by most modern programming languages – including Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, Go, Tcl, C/C++, Java, .Net, and Javascript. It also provides high level of security, reliability and data integrity compared to other open source offerings. And did we mention it is our favorite?

Heroku platform uses PostgreSQL as core database since 2007 for all Applications hosted on it. This service gives option to use Heroku database service by Applications hosted on any other cloud platform like Amazon or Rackspace. In announcing Heroku PostgreSQL as a database service suddenly makes Heroku as a significant competitor to Amazon RDS, Database.com and Azure. Its no more a closed Ruby shop.

According to Heroku “Heroku PostgreSQL creates multiple, geographically distributed copies of all data changes as they are written. These copies are constantly checked for consistency and corruption. If a meteor were to wipe out the east coast, you won’t lose your data.”

Setting up Heroku PostgreSQL database is three simple step process

• Register or sign-in with your Heroku account
• Navigate the database dashboard and click the “+” in the Your Database header. Choose your choice of plan and thus database would be created in next 3-5 minutes.
• Once your database is available click on it to view details. The connection setting section contains all the required information like user-name, password, host, database name and port which can be used to connect the database using any PostgreSQL compatible client.

Heroku database as a service comes with many different plans ranging from $200/month plan with 1.7GB cache to $6,400/month with 68GB cache.
More details about pricing can be checked here http://postgres.heroku.com/pricing

More information can be found on Heroku’s site
http://postgres.heroku.com/

While there are a lot of other Ruby on Rails Hosting options, Engine Yard stood out for us with its support, documentation and control over the cloud infrastructure. Managing Cloud architecture, managing, monitoring and specifically scaling them has been as easy as one could imagine.

It is a great comfort in knowing that your Hosting partner understands the Application Stack  better than you do. With that, we are glad that we signed up to be a Partner for Engine Yard.

About Engine Yard

Engine Yard is the leading development and deployment platform for the cloud. With a unique combination of Ruby on Rails expertise, operations automation, open source community involvement, and world-class service, Engine Yard empowers businesses to build and run cloud-based applications easily and cost-effectively. More than 1,800 customers, from explosive-growth Web startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, trust Engine Yard for fast deployment, rapid scaling, high performance, and 24×7 uptime, allowing them to leverage Rails agility for competitive advantage. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Engine Yard is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com.

This is a presentation given by Praveen Wicliff at one such Startup events, Startup Saturday, Mumbai. Event itself is focused on Cloud Computing and SaaS, where different startups have presented their ideas and products. Simone Brunozzi from Amazon Web Services (AWS) has presented how Startups can use AWS and promised some free Amazon credits. Yay!

So, it was a mixed feeling when Heroku has announced that they have been taken over by Salesforce, the SaaS CRM provider. It is great to see Ruby and Ruby on Rails getting to the next level, playing strong against industry heavy weights like Dot Net and Java. Its great to see how a truly useful product like Heroku, that too on infrastructure side, gets recognition and reward within three years of inception.

Salesforce is a big player in SaaS and now focussing on Cloud, and they surely know how to sell to enterprises. They are the original SaaS company which managed to change perception of software licensing and usage patterns. While Salesforce still have issues in selling Force.com platform to developers, I would not count out their marketing strength and new focus, given that they have launched Database.com in the same week as this take over announcement.

All this is good. The concern really about the kind of technological innovation and marketing focus Heroku will have now. Salesforce is seen more as a marketing innovator rather than technical innovator. Unlike Heroku, which is completely an open platform, Salesforce initial attempt at PaaS with Force.com locks developers and their applications on Salesforce platform.

Heroku focus entirely has been on Ruby on Rails while Salesforce has focused on Java and their own version of Java, Apex. Heroku team assures that they will be still focusing on same vision they started with, next year is going to prove this one way or the other.

One really bright spot has been about Ruby, there is a growing recognition that Ruby language’s inherent strengths are suited for the agile development and cloud infrastructure. In the words of CEO of Salesforce – “Ruby is the language of Cloud”, we gladly agree.

Like the dashboard on a car tells the driver the current state of the car’s operations: current speed, current amount of gas in the tank, etc, the digital dashboard tells a business owner, the current state of his business.

Understanding the potential of the dMine Franchise Dashboards product and Business Dashboards help you monitor the current status of your business, Shambhavi Anand from SME Franchise India has interviewed Sanjay Patel, Director of dMine Business Dashboards products and the benefits that the product brings to the table.

Here is the snapshot of the interview on Franchise Dashboards

What is a business dashboard

A business dashboard or a digital dashboard is the visual display of important data needed to achieve one or more objectives of a business, consolidated and arranged on a single screen, so that they can be easily monitored.

The dashboard can give you the summary of different arrears & industries which are important for you to monitor like, finance, sales & marketing, telecom, hospitality, construction, port, automobile, retail, pharmacy and airlines.

“It helps an organisation achieve its goals by monitoring it’s performance against it’s objectives. Used and deployed correctly, a dashboard can align an organisation or team, focusing everyone’s efforts on common goals and ensuring visibility of performance and allow tracking of the organisations key performance indicators (KPI’s),” says Sanjay Patel, Director, dMine Business Dashboard.

How does it help in business?

A Dashboard will allow you to create, monitor, collaborate and schedule Dashboards for Analytics, Organisational KPIs, balanced scorecards, sales dashboards, performance management, service monitoring consoles, operational metrics and MIS.

It enables organisations to monitor their business performances closely with industry standard metrics and benchmarks. According to Mr Patel, dashboards can be used in any businesses be it manufacturing, retail, insurance, banking / finance, media and entertainment irrespective. For example, in the manufacturing industry, decisions may focus on resource allocation optimization and waste reduction, as supported by the Lean Manufacturing Methodology.

He adds, “For small businesses, it is important to solve business problems at a price that makes sense. Beauty of the Dashboard solutions is, it can start small and grow big in your implementation does not require traditional way of deploying heavy and costly Business Intelligence tools. Hence it perfectly suits well for the SMEs / SMBs also all this at an affordable price.”

Advantages of using a dashboard:

• The data can be displayed in the format you prefer. You have all the choices you want tabular, graph, pie chart, single metrics, graphical trend analysis, capacity gauges, geographical maps, percentage share, stoplights etc.
• The biggest advantage of a dashboard is effective sharing and communication of information which leads to effective monitoring of business operations and facilitates better decision-making process.
• Another advantage of an executive dashboard that technology team will not have to make any extra effort to incorporate this application. The dashboard can run on any compatible browser with adobe flash installed. Some of the recent dashboard products use latest technology to get the best results and this increases the costs of these products. But there are many which use open source technologies as well as rely on existing technology infrastructure of the customers and thus help in reducing the investment costs for customers.
• It is an easy to use technology. There is no need for you to learn any new application. All you need to know is how to click. Dashboards use Rich Internet Application UI and have features like drag and drop.

Where does the data displayed on a dashboard come from?

The data shown in the Dashboards may come from multiple data sources of the various applications being used in an organization. Most of the organizations use systems to capture and store business information while some organizations also use plain vanilla spreadsheets.

Most Dashboard tools run on a read-only mode and prefer storing data in a secure data source so that this data cannot be altered or tampered.

Another important question is whether you can access the data on your dashboard through emails and smart phones? Mr patel says that There have been innovations happening on this front, Business Dashboard tools like dMine have the capability of exporting the Dashboards and charts into PDF formats which is interactive so there are mouse over and mouse click events on the PDF file, thus retaining the experience of the browser even in the PDF file. This PDF file can be sent as an attachment in emails with the graphs and data bundled.

For more details on dMine Business Dashboard Software kindly refer to www.dminedashboards.com

Mumbai, September 10th, 2009

9.9 Media, in association with IBM and Icicle Technologies, hosted an evening event on 10th September 2009, titled “Making the Right Business Decisions” for senior and top managers (including CEOs, CFOs and CIOs) to examine ways to leverage enterprise information for maximum benefit.

The event began at around 6.30 pm with eminent speakers from various industry segments speaking on the importance of Information and how Business Intelligence could help organizations improve performance by creating and monitoring key performance indicators. Around 90 delegates from reputed organizations attended the event and contributed to its success.

Mr. Sanjay Patel, Director, Icicle Technologies spoke on the occasion and emphasized on the need of Business Intelligence Dashboard tools for measuring and monitoring organizational performance. The dMine Dashboard product was demonstrated at the event and got a tremendous response from the delegates.

About dMine Dashboards

dMine Dashboard allows the business users to create, monitor, collaborate and schedule Dashboards for Analytics, Organizational KPIs, Balanced Scorecards, Sales Dashboards, Performance Management, Service Monitoring Consoles, Operational Metrics and MIS.

dMine Dashboards from Icicle Technologies enables organizations to monitor their business performances closely with industry standard metrics and benchmarks. dMine is extensively used across different domains like Manufacturing, IT, Retail, Finance, Media etc.