It is unfortunate to see one of our competitors hit the dust. Coghead was one of our more recent competitors.

My firm launched the web’s first database-in-the-cloud in 1999 and nearly 10 years later, we’re still going strong. This is a time to reflect on how companies survive and how other don’t. I believe the reason my company survived the dot-com bubble burst, and the current economic malaise is that we always took a very conservative approach to running the business. We never took venture funding which would have reduced our control to run the business. We didn’t hire a lot of staff, or try to expand too quickly by depending on future revenue. We only spent what we had. That means today, we’re a thriving concern. If anything, the economic downturn has provided better business rather than less.

Nice follow up indeed. First let me say that I do believe that there is a good place in the world for RAD tools, I just don’t think that PaaS offerings that offer RAD tools for development of Enterprise Applications as their solution is the right place for them.

The problem that I see with many of the PaaS providers out there is that they are offering RAD tools for application development but they are also targeting Enterprise Application ISVs as their target market; honestly for me this is a big disconnect. I think that RAD tools are great to help project managers or small teams get organized and match their needs in a fairly easy way but how much can be said from an ISV that its offering an “Enterprise Application” built with RAD tools. At that point what is preventing any of their customers to simply build the same application that they are paying a premium for themselves. Not only that but it would probably match a lot better their specific needs.

Unfortunately it is sad to see someone like Coghead go because I do believe they had a nice offering, I just don’t think they should have been focusing in targeting ISVs as their target market. Instead I would have focused on targeting small to medium size companies, project managers, department managers, or medium level directors to offer them an alternative to building the software that they’ve always needed to match their exact needs without requiring advanced development help. Trying to convince developers to be locked up to their proprietary technology to build simple applications and call them “Enterprise Applications” to sale to other companies always seemed really far fetched for me but again my opinion is probably biased since we chose to do the exact opposite.

Thanks for your thoughts!
Abe

Second, growth has a back-draft property: ISVs that were standard .NET/Java shops aren’t going to go quietly into the night. Many of them will adapt and mold to new market conditions, so it’s about future leader uptake and legacy company adaption.

http://blog.saasrealist.com/