***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.
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