Last month I had a great conversation with George Lawton, author of Developing Software Online with Platform-as-a-Service Technologies (6MB PDF). His article was just published in the June issue of the IEEE Computer Magazine and highlights Rollbase among a few other PaaS offerings from Salesforce, Google and Intuit.
While we have not yet advertised or marketed Rollbase in any way beyond our launch event in February, Rollbase has been receiving a bit more media attention lately as one of a handful of vendors taking on the challenge of PaaS. e.g. GigaOm Refresh the Net: Do You Know What Kind of Cloud You’re Using? More importantly we are delighted with how much we've accomplished on the R&D front in the past 11 months, and hope to be shifting some energy toward the sales & marketing front in Q3 around the corner.
As the IEEE article mentions, Rollbase is now being used to manage business data and processes such as investment deal flow. However, it's also being used by a number of other paying customers for a variety of things ranging from university enrollment, bus permit management, mortgage client management, accounting client checklists, etc -- all involving deep knowledge of particular domains we know very little about here at Rollbase. This is great initial validation of the PaaS vision and a living example of the Long Tail of Software. But as David Linthicum mentions toward the end of the writeup, "smaller players might succeed by focusing on the core needs of narrow markets." Our partner strategy as well as our direct go-to-market strategy will likely reflect this sentiment as we move toward completion of the beta period. We look forward to a time when we can take a step back from core platform R&D to think about whether Rollbase might be suitable for the creation of applications in one or more domains that we happen to know well here internally, such as vertical-specific CRM or HR.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for more platform feature announcements such as dynamic type-ahead lookup fields (AJAX), dynamic grid edit (AJAX), sequential and parallel approval processes, and a lot more in the queue. The Rollbase Lab is buzzing...
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