Next Generation Internet Applications

A colleague of mine, Michael Hackney, pointed me to an interesting company, DreamFactory and their Cloudware offering. DreamFactory leverages the Amazon infrastructure for their storage and billing infrastructure and Webex for their realtime. This allows them to focus exclusively on the application side and they leverage SalesForce AppExchange as an alternative delivery mechanism. I have to say, this is quite an innovative approach and a disruptive business model. Basically, they hardly own any infrastructure and focus exclusively on value-add. This allows them to be dirt cheap for their entry offering - @12.95 for a starting point + usage fees:

• For their professional offering:
  • Storage: $1.50 per GB/month
  • Data Transfer In: $1.00 per GB/month
  • Data Transfer Out: $1.70 per GB/month

which is basically what Amazon charges for their infrastructure plus a small markup.

Their business model is set up to be low cost and profitable from day one and cover cost as usage increases. For the Amazon of the world, it solidifies their position as the infrastructure that runs the web.

Back from EMC World

Back from EMC World in Las Vegas. Overall this was a very positive show. The numbers are impressive:

• The Content Management and Archiving community represented 23% of the EMC World Audience
• There were more that 200 tracks, sessions and demos showcasing our products for our CMA four solutions platforms

On the Knowledge worker side, this was a very positive event. We publicly announced "Project Magellan" and got some exciting response. Here are some extracts of the positive feedback we received:

• First at Mark Lewis keynote which can be found on YouTube, Mark Lewis introduce our new generation of client as follow: "You will be amazed by the new levels of usability in the content management products we’re introducing, and also the use of Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures to connect our products together" from Byte and Switch
• We also got some very positive blog coverage. Marko Sillanpaa wrote a nice piece on Project Magellan, a few extracts from his post:

  Better still the UI is not only clean but sexy. Learning from the best in UI, Magellan adds interfaces introduced by Apple for iTunes and iPod. In addition to standard thumbnail directory views, Magellan offers a browse option similar to Cover Flow. While search adds a filtering option similar to that in iTunes for finding a song based on a genre and artist.

  But what it does show is that EMC is listening. Finally a UI that is as clean and simple as Alfresco and SharePoint and a bonus that it’s as sexy as an iPhone. And I for one want to say, thank you for listening.

  
  You bet Marko and thank you for the positive write up!