Tag Archive for 'AppEngine'

PaaS from a bookkeeping app? Think beachheads….

Published by Ben Kepes on April 17, 2008 in IT, PaaS, SaaS and Strategy. 4 Comments

Breaking news from Intuit that they are launching a cloud computing offering to compete with Force, AppEngine, Amazon etc.

Intuit is the creator of Quickbooks (think 3.6million users for their bookkeeping offering) and it would seem that this offering is all about creating applications wrapped around Quickbooks (a la Force does with Salesforce) and creating, in essence, a complete SMB offering.

It’s sounding interesting - a very rough split could see Force take enterprise users, Intuit the SMEs and Amazon/Google the consumer market (although that’s a little simplistic and it is very early days yet).

Bob reports that early customers are working on things like;

  • Customer Service
  • Employee Scheduling
  • Existing software vendors looking to add new modules
  • Solution providers looking to move from 1:1 custom work to converting their domain knowledge into applications so they can sell products 1:Millions

I’ll be keen to read the thoughts of the likes of Apprenda about this - is it a threat or simply further validation of PaaS

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PaaS - monolithic or segmented stacks…

Published by Ben Kepes on April 16, 2008 in Design, IT, PaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 0 Comments

An excellent post over on SaaS blogs locks at two possibilities for PaaS. One is very vertical in nature (AppEngine, Force etc) providing all the various layers needed for the offering (library layer, delivery layer, compute layer). The other is much more horizontal in nature where, say, a vendor provides the compute layer but do so very broadly.

Sinclair contends that the latter, more decoupled topology is favourable in that it minimises the risks involved in breaking out one sub-optimally performing layer.

Conceptually speaking there would seem to be something to be gained from going with the vertical topoloy, mnimising relationships, points of contact building efficiencies. I also however understand Sinclairs concerns about the risk of a monolith.

Interesting discussion

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