Coghead Shuts Down And SAP Picks It Up

Yesterday, Techcrunch added Coghead, a PaaS vendor, closed the shutters down, putting their users in some serious jeopardy. This also raises the question critics of Cloud Computing raise during the course of the fear mongering they unleash to protect their bases. How can we rely on Cloud vendors when there is a real danger of the company going out of business one day putting us and our clients in jeopardy. If a SaaS vendor goes out of business, we are the ones who will be in trouble (in most of the cases). However, if a PaaS vendor goes out of business, they also take our clients down because we use the platform to build apps for our clients. So, a PaaS vendor shutting doors has serious consequences than a SaaS vendor shutting their doors. This is a good question to ponder over the weekend. I will offer my thoughts and my solution to this dilemma when we come back next week.

Even though the users of Coghead are in jeopardy, the Coghead team have an escape route. SAP, the reluctant giant from the Pre-Cloud Computing era, has taken over the intellectual property rights and developers of Coghead. No, SAP is not going to support Coghead customers. No, it doesn’t mean that SAP is finally into Clouds. From what we know now, SAP is just going to use the platform for some internal development. The Coghead failure drives home the point Cloud Evangelists are making for a long time. Not everything that glitters is on the web is gold cloud. One should have a smart strategy to take full advantage of the Cloud Computing. As a side note, anyone who is remotely interested in Cloud Computing should visit Cloud Avenue everyday