Announcing Rollbase Private Cloud

Over the past year we have seen increasing demand from partners, enterprises, ISVs and other resellers for running the entire Rollbase platform on their own servers, on their own domain, with complete control over branding and product naming. Because of this demand and the fact that other leading PaaS solutions such as Force.com do not offer a self-hosted option, in 2010 we invested time into redesigning Rollbase so that the full platform can now be easily downloaded, installed, custom-branded, and maintained in a fully self-service manner.

Today we are excited to announce that now any company interested in hosting their own instance of Rollbase has an easy to adopt solution and can get started by simply downloading and installing a free trial of Rollbase Private Cloud. Click here to get started.

What is Rollbase Private Cloud?

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The Rollbase Private Cloud is a complete Platform as a Service (PaaS) designed to run on your own servers or any infrastructure of your choice, such as Rackspace or Amazon. You get all of the features of Rollbase.com running under your own domain and brand, on the hardware and operating systems that make the most sense for your business.

Download a Free Trial
Download and install a fully functional version of the entire Rollbase platform. Start building your own custom SaaS applications within your own instance of Rollbase using our state of the art Platform as a Service (PaaS) on your own servers. Click here to get started

Download and setup a full featured trial in 1 hour

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The video below demonstrates the download, installation and setup process to get Rollbase Private Cloud up and running on your own server in less than one hour. The Rollbase Private Cloud download kit also comes with detailed documentation on installation and configuration procedures.



Contact Us

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For questions about general usage, pricing, or partnerships, contact Sales at 650-265-4282 or sales@rollbase.com

 

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Rollbase Integration with Google Apps

Today we launched the first integration of Rollbase with Google Apps, press release below. For a demonstration video see: http://www.rollbase.com/support/googleapps.shtml

Rollbase Announces Integration with Google Apps
Delivers Google Calendar Synchronization, Gmail and Docs Integration for all Rollbase Applications

SARATOGA, Calif., November 24, 2008 -- Rollbase, Inc., an innovator in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology for business users, today announced the delivery of three new capabilities integrated with the Google Apps(TM) suite of communication and collaboration products. The integration of the Rollbase platform with the products from Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) enables companies of any size to reap the benefits of cloud computing (no hardware or software to download, install or maintain), and allows any Rollbase-native application to become integrated with any customer's Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs accounts.

"We are happy to have quickly leveraged the open Google APIs to bring powerful collaboration features to the Rollbase platform," said Matt Robinson, founder and CEO of Rollbase. "Now any application created with Rollbase can automatically use Gmail to send email, synchronize any event information with Google Calendar, and export application data directly into Google Docs & Spreadsheets, increasing the productivity of any Rollbase and Google Apps users."

Google Apps Integrations for Rollbase

Rollbase designed, developed and integrated the following three solutions with Google products:

-- Rollbase and GMail(TM) - to use the customer's GMail account to send any outbound email from within Rollbase, and storing that email in the user's Sent Items for historical reference within GMail.

-- Rollbase and Google Calendar(TM) - to enable the synchronization of all types of events in any Rollbase application with each user's Google Calendar

-- Rollbase and Google Docs(TM) - for sharing Rollbase data views and reports and making it available to internal and external audiences through Google Spreadsheets

Each of these integrations is now available to every Rollbase customer at no additional cost. For more information and a demo video about these new features see: http://www.rollbase.com/support/googleapps.shtml

About Rollbase

Rollbase is an on-demand application development and delivery platform for businesses to rapidly find, create, customize and share web-based applications using point and click, drag and drop tools within a standard Web browser. Rollbase brings the power of rapid application development to business users, IT professionals, and Web developers who may not have the time, resources or expertise to create on-demand applications using traditional software development methods. As a state of the art Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Cloud Computing Platform, Rollbase enables businesses to focus on application innovation rather than the software and hardware infrastructure behind it. In conjunction with the Rollbase Platform, the Rollbase Application Directory is an on-demand application ecosystem where users can browse, test drive, and install business applications built and published by experienced Rollbase users and partners with a single click. Rollbase requires only a browser and an Internet connection. Founded in August 2007, Rollbase is privately held and funded by angel investors. For more information please visit http://www.rollbase.com.

Google, Google Apps, GMail, Google Calendar and Google Docs are trademarks of Google Inc.

SOURCE: Rollbase, Inc.

Marc Benioff cites Rollbase as example of "Web 3.0"

We've always been fans of Salesforce.com and continue to be inspired by their relentless push to redefine the enterprise software landscape now with Platform as a Service (PaaS) as they have already done with SaaS. So it was with pleasure that I read Marc Benioff's guest post today on TechCrunchIT called Welcome to Web 3.0: Now Your Other Computer is a Data Center:

"Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service... The new rallying cry of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the cloud. When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish...

Amazon.com, Google, and salesforce.com have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build these infrastructures already, and a dozen others, including Facebook, MySpace, Ning, Rollbase, Longjump, Dabble db, Intuit, and Coghead, are also offering some form of platform as a service in the cloud."

Interestingly one reader posted a link to Eric Schmidt's response to "What is Web 3.0?" which demonstrates a nearly identical view from Google's perspective:

"I would tell you that its a different way of building applications... My prediction will be that Web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as applications that are pieced together... applications are relatively small, data is in the cloud, applications can run on any device... very fast, very customizable... Thats a very different application model than we've ever seen in computing... likely to be very very large... new generation of tools being announced..."

At Rollbase our entire platform was conceived, architected and now continually improved upon with a similar vision in mind. Over the next several weeks we have some great new "Web 3.0" features to announce along with our first major Rollbase-native enterprise application that will be licensed separately from our standard PaaS plans.

Cloud on Cloud: Rollbase moves to Amazon S3 for Storage

As any SaaS vendor will attest, cost of application revenue (CoR) is a critical metric that should be constantly monitored and trimmed to maximize margins as operations scale. Cloud computing services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), for which costs are precisely aligned with resources used and no more, can have a dramatic impact on overall CoR.

As of this week we've started an ongoing trimming process that will not only help reduce our CoR, but will have the effect of driving up the amount of resources available to Rollbase customers per unit cost. The first step we've taken in this direction is to move all file storage to Amazon's S3 service. This means that any file and image data stored in file fields, image fields, templates, shared images, etc, throughout your Rollbase account will actually be securely stored on Amazon's infrastructure.

S3 is now the default storage option for all new Rollbase accounts and we are quite comfortable making this move given that Amazon is providing a Service Level Agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 99.9% performance. Stay tuned for an update to the Rollbase PaaS plans allowing for much greater amounts of storage per dollar.

For customers who wish to use Rollbase-native storage rather than Amazon S3 we do have a simple mechanism to enable this for you. Whether for compliance reasons or otherwise, please contact us if you would prefer that your file and image data not be hosted on S3 and we will make the appropriate adjustment to your account (this is quite literally a simple checkbox on our end).

Rollbase featured in IEEE Computer Magazine, GigaOm, etc

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...