Venture Packets: Are Departmental Applications an IT Headache?

***First posted on CIO.com

Whether they admit it or not, nearly all CIOs know that the enterprise application deployments don’t serve the needs of every department in the organization. The manager at a branch office does not need Oracle Financials to track petty cash expenses. The sales manager does not need SAP to track the local inventories. Instead, they have a local technical person or software consultant build a small departmental application using a product such as Microsoft Access or Microsoft SQLServer. Problem solved – at least for some period of time. And then the inevitable happens, the departmental system gets upgraded (or worse crashes) or someone wants the application to do something more sophisticated. IT gets called for support, gets told that their departmental application is not supported and is told to use Oracle or SAP to solve the problem. Productivity loss and frustration ensues.

Enter Coghead, a new startup that I’ve been tracking in the Software as a Service (SaaS) space, to solve this problem. The Coghead service, currently in beta, is both an application development environment and a delivery service for providing access to those applications for end users. You access both via a browser without deploying infrastructure on your site, exemplifying the “Going Bedouin” corporate culture advocated by their affable CTO, Greg Olsen. Like many other SaaS plays, Coghead makes money by charging access fees for the developers and users (pricing details are not available on their website yet).

Coghead gives software developers and consultants a browser-based drag-and-drop environment for building and deploying an application, akin to a services version of Microsoft’s Visual Studio. Users access the application using a browser. Thus, many of the headaches associated with the departmental application are solved – the department application can be developed in an established environment, the infrastructure is outsourced and access to the application is nearly universal.

A key value proposition for Coghead is that IT managers and CIOs will want to give their departments freedom to build the applications they need to run their business if they are managed correctly. Embedded in this value proposition is that these same IT managers and CIOs will allow their departmental applications to be run as a service outside of their proprietary infrastructure.

How about you – are you ready to move your departmental IT applications to a SaaS platform?

Disclaimer: I'm not an investor in Coghead (nor is Panorama Capital). We're just very interested in enterprise infrastructure and SaaS.