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Rollbase was recently added as a featured partner to The Rackspace Cloud, cloud division of Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the
world leader in hosting and cloud computing. To announce the partnership, corporate development executive Wade Minter posted Building Business Applications with Rollbase to the Rackspace Cloud blog:
Building Business Applications With Rollbase
 wminter
on April 29, 2010
Sometimes it’s handy to have a developer on staff, to build web
applications with a high degree of customization. However, what do you
do if you have a need to access your business data through an
application but can’t justify the cost of a dedicated developer or a
contract? Rackspace Cloud partner Rollbase has a solution with their
service allowing even nontechnical users to define business objects,
relationships, and a rich set of tools linking them together.
Easy To Use UI Rollbase provides a simple web UI that allows you to model your
business data and hook into it. At the core of the application are
business objects. These represent things like employees, customers,
inventory items, invoices, and the like. They basically map to
relational database tables, so you can link objects with the standard
array of relationships (one-to-one, one-to-many, etc). You define these
objects, along with their attributes, within Rollbase. Here’s a quick
snapshot of the UI: 
It walks you through the steps to create an object. It allows you to
set up advanced features like audit trails, versioning, and the like as
well as import attributes from a standard list, such as documents,
locations, and workflows, which automatically give you features useful
for those types of objects. The fields in the object also have properties beyond the normal
database varchar/integer set. There are fields for email addresses,
percentages, checkboxes, radio buttons, select lists, and more. For
more complex needs, there are computable fields, which allow you to run
calculations on the input value with Javascript expressions. Once you have your objects and relationships defined, the next step
is providing an interface into them. Using the Rollbase WYSWYG
drag-and-drop view editor, you can develop the interfaces into your
data. Create forms to add or edit data, then build pages to display the
data. Of course, as security is important to your app, you can set
different access permissions to different data on a per-user or
per-group basis. And because the pages are HTML, you can embed custom
HTML/Javascript widgets into them to provide more functionality. Because this is an application designed for business, there are
plenty of features a business will need. Rich email and document
templates are one, allowing for nice-looking mail and exports into Word
and Excel. There is a detailed multi-level charting and reporting
engine as well. Additionally, if you want your applications to face
externally, you can create a public portal into your data, with external
user access available as a control. For users that want to get started with even less effort, Rollbase
has an application directory with more than 20 preconfigured
applications, from Customer Relationship Managers to software bug
trackers to employee management and recruiting. Available in Two Forms: for ISVs and Resellers A hosted white label program makes it easy to develop and deploy
business applications under any brand or identity. Hosted resellers run
on Rollbase’s Rackspace-powered infrastructure. Rollbase is also
offered as a licensed product allowing larger organizations and systems
integrators to procure a robust multitenant platform as the foundation
for SaaS application development and delivery. Licensees can choose to
run Rollbase on dedicated Rackspace physical or Cloud Servers or on servers of their own choosing. Rollbase offers a 30 day free trial, so if your
business or group could use fast, easy, and powerful business
applications, give them a try!
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.
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).
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...
At last week's SaaS Summit I managed to step away from our booth for a few minutes and walked into Phil Wainewright's panel just before his Show of Hands. Sure enough it went down as reported with only 2 hands up for Force.com. After he asked about this "Cloud IDE" category he also did a show of hands for the "Cloud Application Builders" category where he mentioned Rollbase among others. We received the same response - 2 hands. Very weak indeed, but not necessarily a surprise. After all this straw poll was taken at a conference attended mainly by representatives from larger enterprise companies and ISVs rather than SMBs.
As he points out in his recent post, A plethora of PaaS options: "...this was a conference organized by specialist SaaS hoster OpSource, and even though the OpSource team does a great job of making this an event of interest to the entire industry, you'd still have to expect the attendees would skew towards favoring OpSource's managed hosting model. A similar straw poll at a Force.com event would probably skew in the exact opposite direction in favor of Salesforce.com's more packaged platform. To arrive at any other conclusion is mischievous at best."
In this post he goes on to divide cloud computing and hosting choices into five different categories which I've paraphrased here:
- Do-it-yourself: Build your own data center and everything required to run it.
- Managed hosting: Someone else runs the data center but you pick the components to run on.
- Cloud computing: Virtualized infrastructure provided as pay-as-you-go services like Amazon S3, EC2, etc.
- Cloud IDEs: Proprietary online environments like Force.com allowing you to write code and run it on a prepackaged infrastructure.
- Cloud Application Builders: Proprietary online environments such as Rollbase for business users rather than server-side programmers to develop applications purely at the metadata level.
Phil does a great job of highlighting the merits of each, and pointing out that each category is really designed for a different set of users with a different set of goals: "Each of these layers has its own pluses and minuses. For rapid results, especially when automating business processes and workflow rather than simple data processing, the cloud IDEs and application builders win through. For highly tuned performance that depends on diving deep into the technology stack, you're better off working with one of the lower levels."
This simple stratification is important because it's an easily confused area to newcomers who too often perceive the app builders as wanting to "Make Programmers Obsolete". Rollbase as a category 5 cloud application builder provides "rapid results" for "automating business process and workflow" which can be more cost-effective and accessible to individuals and businesses without the resources or expertise to build their own using options from categories 1-4.
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