On February 28, fellow ebizQ blogger Noam Tamarkin wrote about the demise of Coghead, an application development platform as a service (PaaS). By the way I call it an application development tool; Noam may not agree. On March 3, I received a statement from business process management (BPM) luminary and Cordys VP Jon Pyke also bemoaning the end of the 3-year-old startup.
So when a senior software architect and a major force in the BPM world, areas I think of as worlds apart, both comment on the same event, maybe we should dig deeper.
Noam says:
"The main damage was done to the customers who developed and used applications on Coghead. While customers can download data, apps built on Coghead aren't as mobile. The customer's data will be downloaded but the application itself is probably lost. This has similarities to the risks in SaaS (which Noah has written about). (But fortunately...) Another Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider is offering a migration of the application."
Not necessarily in disagreement, Jon Pyke says it matters who steps into the breach to help out Coghead users and by extension anyone that depends on PaaS. Part of his statement is as follows:
"Unfortunately most of the vendors vying for the Coghead business have completely missed the point. This market is not about mash ups, it goes much deeper. Situational Application Provisioning (Byron: yet another term for PaaS?) is a very different proposition from what we think of as applications provisioning. It is a mechanism whereby a user can put together an "application" based around normal working patterns, using readily available services."
Here's where BPM comes in according to Pyke. The successful PaaS vendor should depend on BPM concepts in the areas of governance and rapid development to succeed. PaaS "doesn't help you innovate; it does not enable you to simply build applications to meet the needs. Process technology, in its broadest sense, lets you do this in an easy and flexible way - the processes orchestrate the interaction and integration of services."
And there is no inherent control in the cloud, meaning no ownership and therefore no compliance. Process enablement of PaaS-based applications will provide ownership, control and auditablity - making the compliant with the corporate demands without stifling innovation and change.
I don't think either Jon or Noam is saying this why Coghead failed. But it's food for thought both in the cloud and inside the firewall.
-- Dennis Byron
(Truth in advertising: Jon Pyke and I are Data General alumni or alumnus--whichever my Latin teacher taught me.)
Why is no one saying hat one of the primary reasons Coghead was shut down was that they had VERY few customers in the first place?
Have you talked with ANYONE who had deployed a Coghead application and was using it as an integral piece of their business?
As such, while it is a disappointing end, it is not clear to me that this portends any greater outcome for the world than a failed company that had a really interesting idea but could not get it to track.
Dennis
Some interesting points being raised here. It is clear in today's world all business applications need to support BPM as a discipline. It is how you get there that really matters. As you say it is about the application development tool(s). This is where those with capability to build rapidly led by business with in built agility will win over old component based software tools requiring stitched together by programmers.
Coghead's early demise raises the question of the consequences where the "application is lost". Until this is addressed what business person is going to allow a mission critical application be outside their control?
We at Procession are proposing that SaaS is more of a financial lease and at any time the customer can not just get their data back but also have the application readily transferrable to an in house or a new hosting server. Indeed why not allow the customers to keep an updated copy of the application as security.
We at Procession have pioneered a new core design philosophy that such as Microsoft only now try to follow. With this will come new deliver capability which needs to gain the confidence of the business manager. Despite a tough environment we stuck to our core competency and managed to avoid both trade and VC investors. That's why we survive and maybe why Coghead failed?