Do you really want your IT department to define your application stack?
The term “Platform-as-a-Service” or PaaS is gaining widespread popularity. The PaaS promise is that either a hosted solution or a private cloud solution gives your enterprise all you need. You just write an application and post it to the Cloud. “Cloud Magic” will run and scale it for you. There is no lack of competition in […]
Apprenda Shifts the Game on Polyglot Vs Best of Breed PaaS
One of the biggest battles raging in the PaaS world has been between the Polyglot and the Best of Breed camps. In the polyglot corner stands Heroku, Engine Yard and Cloud Foundry who all say that only a platform that gives an organization the ability to develop in multiple different
Engine Yard Differentiates through Control and Choice
I kind of feel sorry for Engine Yard sometime – once seen as one of the two best-known Platform as a Service offerings (alongside Heroku), the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce kind of reduced Engine Yard’s visibility. The subsequent release of Cloud Foundry, and the significant uptake it has had in the marketplace have further […]
Celebrity Engineers–Software’s Equivalent of Arts Patronage
Back in the days gone by, if you were part of the landed gentry, lording over your landholdings and the common folk who lived on said land, you’d look to becoming a patron of the arts as a way to ensure your name would live on after your death. While perhaps not a particularly sound […]
Force.com and the Uber-Democratization of Programming
In the last few weeks I’ve started to riff on James Govenor’s meme, that of developers becoming the new kingmakers. I recently wrote a post discussing what I saw happening with Salesforce – how the combination of force.com and Heroku was creating a real gravity pull for developers and that Salesforce was primed to be […]
Heroku Joins Cloud Foundry for Multi-PaaS Support from Appsecute
Let’s settle two things from the outset – firstly, PaaS is (I believe) the future of cloud services and will be the area for growth in the coming years. Secondly, I’m an investor and board member in Appsecute so I’m naturally bullish about what they’re doing. That said, today’s announcement
If Developers are the new Kingmakers–Salesforce is Starting to Own the Castle
I’ve been attending Salesforce’s user conference now for a few years and one thing that’s always been a little awkward is the fact that Salesforce has always tried to make the event meaningful for developers but has generally created a kind of Frankenstein beast where suited business types get highbrow in the main conference whilst […]
There’s Epic Inflation in Silicon Valley
Last night, David Hornik of August Capital was kind of enough to invite me to speak with him on a Technology and Law class at Stanford. After the event, an entrepreneur I had been emailing with but hadn’t met yet came up to me. While his company is in a different space, I was struck […]
Apprenda Introduces Free Public-Cloud Hosted Version of Its PaaS
In the seeming ever increasing rush towards so-called polyglot PaaS, or PaaS-providers supporting every language under the sun, there has been a single lone voice that has consistently been saying polyglot is a failed methodology. New York based Apprenda makes a .NET PaaS and has long said that only through
Looking Forward to DreamForce 2012
The annual Salesforce extravaganza DreamForce is just around the corner (disclosure, I’ll be attending DreamForce and Salesforce will be covering my T&E account) and with it comes my annual look forward and prediction of what is to come. For reference check out my previous prediction posts here and here. This
The Future Ain’t Homogenized–Please Stop the FUD Vendors
We all, commentators, vendors and customers, need this cloud thing to happen safely and consistently. Dogmatic messages like these ones do nothing to increase the comfort level of prospective or actual cloud customers. Vendors, please stop it now. That is all.
Heroku hstore: Key Value Store Inside Relational Database
Heroku (previous CloudAve coverage), the PaaS company under Salesforce, announced recently that they will be supporting key value store inside their Postgres database instances. Named hstore, it takes advantage of Postgres’ extensibility. Ever since MySQL was gobbled up by Oracle, Postgres has been getting additional developer love from the community. I am not saying that […]
CollabNet Shows the Future of PaaS
I’ve been very bullish over the past couple of years about the role PaaS will play in a cloudy world. I see it as the future for cloud services. I’ve also commented about the increasing homogeneity of PaaS offerigns as they all start chasing each other to add new languages and frameworks – from the […]
Reality Distortion Field : 17 Companies’ Sitrep
I’m sitting on the bus this morning. As happens almost every day of the week. I’m flipping pages, sort of, it’s an eBook on my Kindle App. I’m reading about Steve Jobs taking over the Macintosh Program at Apple. How things started to fall into place for Apple, for the Macintosh, and how Jobs saw […]
PaaS Ecosystems–AppFog Unveils an Add-On Program. How Much on a PaaS Should be Core Functionality?
A growing theme amongst PaaS players is to develop an add-on program to give users of their platforms the ability to acquire and provision third party services that are already integrated with the core development environment. It’s a trend that Heroku for instance has followed for years – it allows
