Coghead launches low-cost SaaS apps
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(InfoWorld) - Coghead, an early pioneer in the creation of a Web 2.0 application development platform, announced a deal on Thursday with British Telecom (BT) that will give Coghead developers access to BT's telephony services and, by extension, its 1 million customers. Coghead also announced a low-cost package of SaaS (software as a service)-based applications dubbed Business Essentials for small business. Business Essentials includes applications for asset tracking, project management, access to company directories, lead management, and PTO (paid time off) management and recruitment. According to Laurie McCabe, vice president of SMB insights and solutions at AMI-Partners, Coghead is one of the first to tap into the need for very small businesses to automate their manual systems. "The legacy stuff out there isn't going to do the job if you look at cost and ease of use for those packaged applications," said McCabe. Even pricing for some of the early SaaS providers of services for SMBs is out of range for smaller businesses. "You might be spending $200 to $300 a month once you add in all the add-on services at Salesforce.com," McCabe said. Instead, Coghead is offering a flat rate of $10 per user, per month for its entire suite of applications. Asset Tracking will track electronic assets and provides a template for maintenance schedules. Basic Project Manager includes file sharing and resource management. Company Directory offers departmental data and reporting hierarchy. Lead Management tracks contacts, leads, and opportunities. PTO Tracker will allow employees to track monthly PTO. Recruiting Manager manages such features as resumes, open positions, and interview schedules. Finally, My Dashboard will give users a view of tasks and activities. The Coghead applications represent the continued expansion both up and down the business food chain of Web-based services. For many small businesses, Web 2.0 applications are the only workable solution if they want to enter the digital age. "There are 50 million businesses that donât have a server," said Paul McNamara, CEO at Coghead.Â  Coghead's deal with BT represents the interest that some of the largest enterprises are taking in the Web 2.0 architecture. It will give Coghead developers access to BT's telephony services, and it provides BT with the potential to offer a host of new services quickly and without a great deal of its own investment. For example, developers could embed BT's SMS capability into an application developed on the Coghead platform for CRM.Â  While the deal with BT covers the other side of the Atlantic, McCabe believes there will be similar deals on this side of the pond as well. "The primary piece of infrastructure for Web 2.0 applications is the Internet connection. Telecom companies like BT own the infrastructure, and they want to be able to offer more services over it," said McNamara. Business Essentials is available immediately. Pricing starts at $49 per month for five users.
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Triggit founder Zach Coelius tells how secured the initial funding for his startup when he started playing poker in a game frequented by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. The web publishing tool launches Thursday.
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HP and Red Hat have announced a new low-cost Linux desktop bundle for small and medium businesses in Australia.
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Google announced new pricing for its Postini hosted e-mail security and compliance management package on Tuesday in hopes of pushing more customers to consider a move to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) offering.
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SAP is rolling out a hosted service it hopes will appeal to midsize customers that can rent the software for as little as $325 per user per month while avoiding the complexity of in-house installations.
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InfoWorld - Microsoft will release architectural guidance for organizations looking to offer SaaS (software as a service) on Thursday.
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Computer Associates introduces usage-based pricing model for mainframe software.
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Software giant introduces first in a series of online communities for its Dynamics apps users.
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SaaSWizard is announcing Monday its SaaSWizard 2.0 rapid application development platform for building SaaS and internally hosted applications, sans programming.Positioned for hosted business-to-business applications, the Java-based platform enables developers and original equipment manufacturers to quickly assemble applications that can be hosted by SaaSWizard or inside a corporate firewall, SaaSWizard said.SaaSWizard offers a business rules engine to automate back-end processes."I'd say the main focus of the new version of functionality is the business rules engine," said Colin Earl, SaaSWizard CEO."It allows you to configure the program to automate business processes," such as a sales request that has been submitted but not responded to in several hours, Earl said. Business rules can be defined to escalate a request like this, he added.Version 2.0 also features dynamic data modeling, enabling custom tables and table relationships to be created quickly; graphical drag-and-drop workflow, and a virtualized grid environment. This environment ensures that an application will continue to run when a server or other component fails.Other new features focus on application customization, auditing and advanced access controls for organizations to meet regulatory mandates. SaaSWizard 2.0 also integrates with LDAP directories and Windows management Instrumentation, for automatic discovery of users' computer environments.Also included in version 2.0 are a charting and reporting engine, with dozens of default charts, and drag-and-drop dashboard compilation, for combining charts from multiple tables.A user of the product vouched for its ease of use. "I would characterize it as a rapid development platform that doesn't require programming," with a graphical environment for developing custom applications, said the user, Steve Chipman, founder of Lexnet Consulting Group, a value-added reseller (VAR).Lexnet used the platform to develop ManuLogic, a support application for equipment applications. It can either be hosted or installed on-premises."I like [SaaSWizard] because it's a SaaS platform that's available to a VAR and in general VARs are insulated from the revenue share on SaaS-driven applications," Chipman said. But with SaaSWizard, Lexnet is able to build an application that it could resell, he said.SaaSWizard 2.0 is built on an open source technology stack featuring Linux, the JBoss application server and the MySQL database. Solaris, AIX and Windows also are supported.Additional capabilities include:* Email integration.* A text search engine.* Single sign-on.* Multi-language support.* Customization.
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Coghead took a giant step toward taking Web 2.0 application development mainstream with the announcement today of Coghead version 2.0 which will use Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud) hosting service and incorporate the Adobe Flex development environment into its infrastructure.The target market for Coghead's 100 percent Web-based development environment are knowledge workers, rather than programmers, and the 50 million businesses that don't have a server, said Paul McNamara, Coghead CEO.Using Flex will give those knowledge workers a bigger library of widgets to use in order to create forms and at the same time enlarge the community of developers who can write applications using Coghead."We are trying to expand the range of people who can create business applications from simple applications created by moderately technical people all the way up to professional programmers," said McNamara.Version 2.0 is three times faster than the original version released in April 2007, according to McNamara, thanks mainly to performance enhancements using Adobe Flex."The Flex packet size is compact and efficient between server and desktop," said McNamara.The other major highlight of version 2.0 is the deal with Amazon to use its EC2 hosting environment, which will give users assurance that their data and application definitions are safely stored in the Amazon cloud.In addition, McNamara said that creating Web services on Amazon's platform has always be a daunting task, and by putting Coghead on top of EC2, Amazon will also extend its market to less technical developers.In coming news, Coghead is also working to adopt Adobe AIR, formerly code named Apollo, onto its platform. AIR gives users the ability to work with Web 2.0 applications offline and will cut down on the initial load of an application.Coghead Version 2.0 is available now.
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The software maker tweaks its small-business product, making several services free, but adding charges for domain name registration beyond the first year.
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New lineup of low-cost PCs includes with some multimedia capabilities.
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ActiveGrid lands multimillion-dollar funding for plan to use open-source tools, low-cost servers for Web applications.
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EnterpriseWizard this week is releasing the 2.0 version of its CRM application, a product built on top of its SaaSWizard Web application development platform and designed to be easily customizable.