The Keene View on Web 2.0, Ajax and SaaS

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.

WaveMaker's position as the only open source cloud development platform makes it a "must have" cloud ecosystem partner. WaveMaker is ideal for ISVs who want to SaaS-enable their offerings and enterprises who want an easy way to take advantage of cloud computing's compelling economics.

Analysts groups are jumping on board as well - Gartner alone produced 9 reports featuring WaveMaker in 2009! Here are some of my favorite quotes from the year:

• "Our walk into the cloud with WaveMaker turned out to be a very short journey - and a pleasant one!" - Mark Angel, CTO KANA
• "Consider WaveMaker Cloud Edition if you want a 4GL-style development tool that uses standard technologies and open-source frameworks, and you wish to create new SaaS-style offerings." - Eric Knipp, Research Analyst, Gartner Group
• "I predict that WaveMaker will be an important cloud company to watch in 2010!" - Judith Hurwitz, President Hurwitz & Associates
• "2010 just might be the year to crown WaveMaker the PowerBuilder for the web" - Brian Gentile, CEO JasperSoft

2009 was a tough slog - we are determined to make 2010 a victory lap!

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

Labels: cloud computing, SOA

I have had some interesting conversations recently with partners about how cloud computing will affect the developer tools market.


Roughly every 10 years, a technology disruption changes developer aspirations and drives them to adopt new tools that get them to new places.

With client/server, developers aspired to build "modern" apps and break free of the bureaucracy of central IT. Cloud computing offers a similar, updated, value - deploy web applications without the hassle of central IT.

Developer aspirations are changing - this is the underlying market driver for WaveMaker.

At the same time, IT vendors are seeing their value disrupted. As the data center morphs into a set of APIs, decisions which used to be made by sys admins and DBAs are made by the developer (Cloud Foundry is a good example of this).

The developer platform is becoming the control panel for the data center - this is the WaveMaker's value to partners. This is also the basis for our cloud quick start program with IBM, Amazon and RightScale.

One company that has realized the competitive opportunity in cloud computing is Microsoft. By integrating Visual Studio with Azure, they have created a powerful engine from which to attack the entire data center infrastructure.

If business developers really do "take to the clouds", the challenge I see for IT infrastructure providers is how to harness changing developer aspirations to ensure that the cloud deployment stack includes their solutions.

Labels: cloud computing, WaveMaker

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."

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 today 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.

How easy you ask? Well, how 'bout:

• 15 second WaveMaker hello world test drive
• 7 minute WaveMaker multi-tenant SaaS screencast
• Free open source download of WaveMaker at www.wavemaker.com/downloads
  
• WaveMaker cloud edition at cloud.wavemaker.com

With all this open and cloudy goodness, it is not surprising that the momentum behind WaveMaker continues to build.

What kind of momentum? Well, how 'bout:

• WaveMaker's open source community now numbers more than 15,000 active developers
• The Cloud Quick Start Partnership teams WaveMaker with IBM, Amazon and RightScale
• Citrix makes WaveMaker available as an integrated development platform for NetScaler
  

Let the fireworks begin!

Labels: citrix, ibm, paas, rightscale, saas, WaveMaker

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.

Labels: cisco, paas, vmware, WaveMaker

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.

WaveMaker, RightScale, IBM and Amazon just announced their own cloud ecosystem. This ecosystem is being marketed as a cloud quick start program, which aims to make cloud computing ridiculously easy and give companies a one-stop solution for migrating existing Java applications to SaaS and cloud computing.

Not only are all of the cloud quick start products fully integrated and running today in the Amazon cloud, but the integration is available for anyone to use who has an Amazon account. Even better, the first company to complete the 2 day cloud quick start program, KANA, was so impressed with the results that they plan on going live with their first cloud deployment before the end of the year.

What makes the cloud unique is not the individual bits of software running in some dark data center, but that for the first time it is easy to stand up a number of complex pieces of software, knit them all together and make the resulting integrated solution available to anyone who wants to use them.

Take for example the elements of the cloud quickstart program, which integrates products from four enterprise software companies. Just imagine trying to pull off this kind of integration without the cloud.

First of all, you would have to get software licenses from each vendor, then find a place to install them all and then figure out how to integrate them. These tasks alone would take weeks to months.

Now compare that with the same scenario in the cloud. WaveMaker, RightScale and Amazon already have software running on Amazon EC2 and available for anyone to use. Once the companies have done the basic integration work, it is easy to produce custom AMIs that provide a pre-integrated solution to the rest of the world.

The cloud quickstart program for cloud application development from WaveMaker, RightScale, IBM and Amazon is not the only example of this kind of ecosystem. An equally impressive ecosystem for cloud business intelligence launched a little over a month ago featuring RightScale, Jaspersoft, Talend and Vertica.

Cloud hosting providers like Amazon provide a sort of global workbench on which software vendors can integrate quickly and without even having explicit business relationships. This may in the end prove to be the real killer app for cloud computing - the ability to adopt entire software ecosystems with the click of a button.

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).

Labels: cloud computing, ibm, paas, RighScale, WaveMaker

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!

Nothing strikes fear into the heart of our professional services team quite like the words: "yeah, we're thinking about rolling out IE 7 sometime in the next 18 months."

But now there is a way out of the nightmare that is IE. Alex Russell at Google (of Dojo Toolkit fame) has figured out a way to run Chrome as a plug-in inside of IE - even the old versions. This means that web developers can build applications the way nature intended and IE is none the wiser.

For cloud computing in general and Platform as a Service in particular, this is great news. With Platform as a Service (PaaS), you develop and deploy apps from within your browser, so the power of the browser directly governs the power of the your development platform.

For WaveMaker and other PaaS vendors, this extends the reach of our cloud computing solutions to the back hinterlands of corporate America where technological change comes most slowly and where consequently frustration with IT is highest.

Labels: Web 2.0

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!

Labels: cloud computing, paas, rightscale, websphere