Coghead, a visual web-based application editor that allowed users to develop enterprise applications using an intuitive GUI, is closing its doors. The company attributes its closing to the dire economic situation, and says that users will be able to access and download their data through April 30, 2009.
The site launched back in October 2006, when we praised it for being more accessible than some of its competitors. Since then we’ve covered it extensively as it allowed users to embed their applications (called Coglets) into any webpage, launched an affiliates program, and more recently, the introduction of Coghead 2.0, which was based on Adobe Flex.
This statement was just sent to all customers:
Dear Valued Coghead Customer:
On behalf of the entire Coghead team, I would like to thank you for your past business. We have taken pride in offering you our state-of-the-art Platform-as-a-Service to support your development of software applications. Regretfully, due to the impact of economic challenges, Coghead has discontinued its operations.
Effective immediately, the Coghead service and the license agreement to which customers agreed when they registered for the service are terminated. However, existing customers will be able to access and use their applications and data through my.coghead.com until April 30, 2009 on an unsupported, “as is” basis without any representations or warranties (express or implied) or indemnity from Coghead or any other party. To use the service during this period, customers must go to http://my.coghead.com/api/util/serviceterms.jsp and accept the specified terms of use listed. Effective immediately, all access and use of the applications and data available through my.coghead.com shall be pursuant to the terms listed at http://www.coghead.com/serviceterms.html.
Customers should download their data that is available through my.coghead.com before 3:00 p.m. Pacific time on April 30th. However, Customers should not attempt to copy, modify, reproduce or reverse engineer any portion of the software that is part of, or used in the delivery of, the service. Customers will not be charged for their use of the service through April 30th. In light of the foregoing, we strongly recommend that customers limit their work on existing projects and refrain from initiating new projects and application rollouts.
Basic support inquiries can be submitted to support@coghead.com until 3:00 p.m. Pacific time on April 30, 2009.
Thank you again for your past business and support.
Coghead
We’ve added Coghead to the Deadpool.
Free = Bad. TechCrunch business model bites the dust yet again. LOL.
had nothing to do with economic environment – it was bad product, bad marketing and bad management. why do these startups blame the economy?
The economy is helping SaaS and PaaS to grow. I am not sure about the reason. It is something to do with their product startegy, the management and Investors.
i dont expect this to be the last TC50 to head to deadpool…
WOLF frameworks opens their XML framework to read & restore Coghead customer applications without any programming or initial financial commitment.
WOLF, the AJAX and XML based Platform-as-a-Service for designing business applications, today offered to migrate & restore stranded Coghead customer applications without any initial financial commitment or programming. WOLF Platform technology is able to read Coghead application design XML without any manual intervention & restore all entities, screens, business rules, complete application design & even import data thru’ an automated utility.
Read more: http://www.wolf...e.asp#22feb2009
A new twist in the Coghead “lockin” saga: automated application migration
Wolf Frameworks, told me this morning that they have written a program that takes a Coghead application definition file (the XML is available from Coghead) and converts it into Wolf Framework XML, thereby eliminating the need to manually recreate your forms, reports and business rules.
Read more: http://www.powe...pplication.html
Seems like TC has been making a lot of deadpool posts lately…I was especially glad to see Juicycampus go.
Waaa waa “dire economic situation”. My small web based business with 5 employees continues to generate $1.5M/year with a 70% profit margin in this economy. Businesses that are failing are poorly run IMO.
What is your business?
Porn?
If you’re looking to buy a business, post your contact info and credentials. Otherwise, I don’t have anything to gain by telling you what I do. I only posted here to make a point.
And no, it’s not porn. Advertising supported community sites.
And no, it’s not an easy to copy business model. We get more than 3 Million uniques/month to a handful of sites built over 8 years. Not something you’re going to replicate overnight. Zero funding, zero debt.
I’m not telling you what the company is because I already revealed confidential revenue & profit stats above.
So yes, you should realize that online advertising is still quite strong. We have seen a decline in ad revenues, but only about 20%.
You have to think outside the box. You have to create value. You can’t just do what everyone else is doing and expect to get rich from it. You have to identify a niche, and the more capable you are personally (to setup and operate the business without massive expenses), the more likely you will succeed.
You sound like someone who hasn’t had a failure yet.
Do you mean like selling my first business during the dot bomb for millions, watching my wealth evaporate, and then starting from scratch and building a new successful business? If so then yes I’ve experienced failure. I’m not saying that this economy is fun – it’s more challenging yes. But CEOs of failing businesses are using the economy as a blanket excuse and this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this line… I believe the founder of juicycampus said the same thing on his way out..
We still do not know what is your current business.
@Alan
It is probably an easy-to-copy business model which forces the owner to be secretive about it. No offense to David though – If he is telling the truth, he gives me hope that not everything is as bad as the media wants to portray…
David -
Hussah!! Nice to know folks who are actually making money “the old fashioned way” (as John Houseman used to say) are still out there. Business fundamentals never change and all of the 20-somethings who think that they’re doing something ‘new and different’ are just kidding themselves.
Rock on brother!
Cheers,
- Bill
Sounds like TenFold, a company in the previous bubble that enabled users to create business applications based off of a database interface. Was Rick Sherlund’s stock of the year for 1999. When will they learn…
This is a shame because they really did have a nice offering. However, their business model was crap.
not necessarily coghead, but glad to see this economy filtering out the other crap. 2-3 years we’ll see some nice sites.
true words here. Just wondering how many companies have been deadpooled aftet the economic downturn. TC should have a post on those numbers, I’m curious!
besttechjobs
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
agreed
Have you thought of looking into LongJump?
Bummer
na na na na
na na na na
hey hey hey
goodbye
How about some more useful analysis of *what* it was about their business plan that killed them?
I recall that, every time I saw their product, I almost raced to convert a bunch of legacy filemaker DBs over… And then something happened, something about how users were counted, or seats, or… Something. I can’t quite recall, but the fees were high, I’m sure – not free as one of the haters above states.
If you are interested in a real PaaS offering check SaaSGrid from the Apprenda folks; It’s not a WYSIWYG editor but a true hosting runtime for enterprise SaaS applications with alot of business value added.
We are evaluating it for a couple big scope enterprise projects and we are very impressed with what we’ve seen so far.
DP
You should also check out Qrimp.com for your enterprise projects, I think you will be throughly impressed with power and capabilities of the Platform.
“The site launched back in October 2006″
In 2006, you could have launched a shoe horn fanboi website and gotten 11.2 million in funding.
This is NOT 2006
This is one of the big reasons web-based apps aren’t taking off as fast as they could be. When even Google starts canceling apps, how can any responsible business move vital operations onto part of the cloud owned by someone else?
Hiring programmers right now is relatively cheap. Convincing companies not to roll their own is going to be a hard sell.
Deano wants an analysis of what went wrong? Well Deano hit most of it on the head. The short and simple of what went wrong – it’s fees were much too high for the market they were going after. Or maybe I should say the market that would have used the product. Coghead would have been a really cool app for individuals and small businesses but it wasn’t really an app for large enterprise. So the next question is what happens to all that code now that it has went under? Take your code and convert it to an open source project that people can run on their own servers, don’t expect to get rich quick, and make yourselves a nice living for the time being. Who knows with a plan like that and some hard work maybe you could sell the company 5 to 7 years down the road for a pretty penny.
according to comments at http://blogs.ws...d/tab/comments/ Coghead is owned by SAP and they shut the doors intentionally. I do know that SAP Ventures was a backer of the company, so I’m highly skeptical that the source will be opened.
Terrible idea. Software development will not move online any time soon, if ever.
Bye, Coghead
I’m gonna miss you…..
http://www.hootsioksiok.com
http://www.printthing.com
I always found it really difficult to figure out, I think some usability testing could have gone a long way with this app.
Trying to figure out what they are going to do with any development they have. Are they going to sell it, or just trash it or what?..I’d be interested in buying it and taking it further, since I have a good sized Flex team…
This will not be the last company to fail in the current economic recession. It doesn’t mater whether an online product is free (ad supported) or paid. If a product is ad supported then we have seen significant decease in Adsense revenue. On the other hand, if the product is sold at a price, there is now fewer number of people who are willing to spend money.
May I suggest you guys at Techcrunch to do a ‘deadpool timeline’? Would be interesting to see who died when…
Actually, seeing most techcrunch news in a timeline would be kinda cool too, no?
Sad to see Coghead go away!
Not sure they had too much customers, but If they did, it’s really a hard thing having a Platform-as-a-Service solution just … going dark.
It’s not only your data that’s in: it’s also your business logic, your processes, etc.
Essentially, they said you have to pay the bill for a Flex developer/devteam to re-develop your existing application on pure flex migrating your existing data, which you did not want to pay at the first place (that’s why you have choosen a platform solution), in 2 and half a month’s time?
That’s a pure loss: You’ll pay 100% of the price you considered too much to pay for, plus you have paid these guys for some time, plus you had development costs with the application you built on their platform – and also you have to hurry, most possibly you will have to retrain some of your employees, etc…
In sum: at least triple the costs of the original..
So, either:
Never, ever use a Platform-As-A-Service solution, since in the long run, they’ll costs multiple times more than to avoid them,
OR
Make sure you sign on PAAS providers which DO have a going-out plan (like giving all of their customers a server pre-installed with their environment, even if locked, so that the software could still run for an indefinite amount of time)
Why not just export the data and move it to another vendor? There are plenty of competitors out there who would be happy to help get the data imported to their system and earn a new customer.
Qrimp.com is one of those…just export and upload the CSV or excel spreadsheet and get to work.
I agree that going-out plan is a good idea, there is a BUT though… We’ve already witnessed how Zoho Creator tried it with GoogleApps, I think it won’t work as expected. And this is exactly why:
http://webappsa...-engine-so.html
You’re pointing out the pitfalls of going with a PaaS solution based around a *proprietary* programming and data platform. However, the risk and cost of moving is much lower if you are using PaaS vendors built around standard programming platforms that are well known (like Java or Ruby on Rails).
Had CogHead used a more open application platform where there was little-to-no cost to moving CogHead apps to another vendor or to host them internally. It’s quite possible that customers would still have saved money overall by being able to develop and launch their app (and therefore prove its utility to the organization) before having to make the long-term commitment to self-manage the app and its resources.
Bye Coghead. We’re gonna miss you….
What are they doing with the Cogheadd platform?
Please open source that code base, and do right by your customers, Coghead. It’s the “right” thing to do
They didn’t really have a chance. Business application have no “business” in the clouds. It doesn’t work and never will.
Now that another one of our competitors has fallen, anyone who would like a better and different view of building web applications they can check out Qrimp.com or go with Caspio who is so eagerly trying to win their customers. Give Qrimp five mintues and you will see the power….plus you get two months free as well.
I’d rather offer my sympathy to Coghead customers, which went empty-handed, than vendor. What are they supposed to do? It’s their concern how to save the data, let alone the the app functionality.
It’s better to offer some migration options:
http://webappsa...upposed-to.html
At TrackVia, we understand how important a customer’s data is and are offering to help Coghead customers transition their data from Coghead to TrackVia’s online database.
We are also offering Coghead customers a 20% discount for the life of their account.
http://www.trac...tomer-discount/
I guess things can’t stay free forever.
PaaS is still going to be a game changer, but I really believe that PaaS companies need to have a stabilizer in order to survive. Selling an app platform is a touchy thing. It’s like selling ideas not some canned product. That’s because it requires effort on the part of the buyer — an investment of thought and energy at a time when budgets are in the dumper.
If you don’t have a second source of income or a VC sugar daddy who is in it for the long haul, you will see things like this — essentially a failed marriage between funding and business model.
As a competitor, I can truly say that Coghead was a pretty good platform. What they were able to do with public widgets was impressive. But it was starting up as a platform company, not a solution company and any inroad into serious businesses requires real solutions that capture the power of the platform.
If someone were looking to put their eggs into a platform-as-a-service for a solution, they should take a look at the company itself and make sure it’s viable. Even the heavily touted Salesforce.com has it’s own traditional revenue stream to offset the costs of a PaaS push.
We’re proud to say that LongJump (http://longjump.com) has never raised a dime of VC funding, we’re a profitable operation thanks to not firing up all engines all the time, a suitable other line of business, and we’re making hey with our platform play on our own merits.
Derek, to be fair, you haven’t taken VC funding, but you are backed by Relationals, so aren’t you in the same scenario as SalesForce/Force.com?
You guys have a fine product for sure.
I think what is important right now is that the other PaaS providers among us step up to the plate and help make this transition as easy as possible for existing Coghead customers.
We need to team together to instill trust in the cloud. If just let customers get burned like this, they’ll be even /more/ hesitant to move to the cloud in the future. We aren’t competitors here, we are collaborators. We can fight later, but right now we are in the ER and coghead has flatlined, so we have to do something.
It’s our responsibility to protect and secure coghead’s customers because they believe in the idea of application platforms on the web. Lots of people are going to say, “See, Richard Stallman was right!!” But he wasn’t.
That’s too bad. Sorry to see Coghead go.
QuickBase has just launched its offer to former CogHead customers:
http://quickbas...uit.com/coghead
We’re sorry to see Coghead go and wish you the best. To the former customers: we welcome you and look forward to helping you transition.
I am very sorry to see coghead go. They really did a tremendous amount to push the PaaS model forward.
If people had been working with Iceberg they could run it on their own server instead of depending totally on the provider.
I’d like to invite any ex coghead developers over to come and check out Iceberg. At http://www.geticeberg.com
To the innovators in coghead I genuinely offer my condolences, you’ve really blazed a trail for the rest of us.
Wayne Byrne
CEO
Iceberg
http://www.geticeberg.com
I wrote some of my thoughts on Coghead, obstacles they may have run in to:
http://appfacto...s-the-plug.html
I think Derek from LongJump has the most important insight into the economics of running a purely hosted PaaS business — in general it must be subsidized by a bigger parent product or service to be viable long-term.
Force.com Salesforce.com CRM customers
QuickBase Intuit QuickBooks, Quicken, etc customers
LongJump Relationals CRM customers
S3, EC2, etc Amazon.com customers
App Engine Google Advertisers
There are some smaller pure PaaS vendors that prove exception to this, but they keyword is small (i.e. less than $5M ann rev). QuickBase, possibly the oldest and most successful web-based DIY PaaS product available today, is only doing $15M ann recurr rev after 10+ years on the market supported by Intuit.
Customer demand is not yet strong enough in this area to create a big pure-play DIY PaaS vendor. It works fairly well when coupled with a domain-specific app such as CRM, but nobody has managed to scale such a business on its own.
At Rollbase we’ve shifted to a license model moving forward to grow the business and have seen much more customer appetite (in terms of willingness to make significant investments) for licensing the code.
Clarification regarding QuickBase: I should have mentioned that the $15M ann recurr rev estimate for QuickBase is not from official sources and is based only on past discussions with QuickBase partners, therefore, it may be entirely incorrect.
Regardless of its numbers QuickBase is a great product subsidized by a stable vendor and not likely to have issues long-term.
The Coghead news is interesting, but it’s been a (relatively) long time in the making. My question is…how did TechCrunch and other Valley insider rags not pick up on the fact that the CEO and most of the staff was let go several months ago?
Mike Topalovich
Delivered Innovation (Reformed Coghead Partner)
1. I’m a customer (or was, not sure yet).
2. I think their product was great, although I agree that it is difficult to introduce it in a big company.
3. I don’t like how they propose to make the transition to some other place. I would have liked some more time and more info… how about a deal with a couple of competitors with some help to move there?
By the way, I’ve just received a new email from them. There’s not a lot of new info, but I paste it here anyway.
Dear valued customer,
Yesterday, you received a notice informing you that Coghead has discontinued its service.
As Chairman, I wanted to reach out to you and personally thank you for your support of Coghead.
As I have received a number of questions as to the conditions leading to yesterday’s announcement, I wanted to provide you with some additional information to avoid any confusion.
SAP has purchased Coghead’s intellectual property assets. Leading up to this transaction, we made a careful evaluation — certainly the level of enthusiasm for Coghead was high and our business was growing fast. But faced with the most difficult economy in memory and a challenging fundraising climate, we determined that the SAP deal was the best way forward for the company.
SAP did not assume any of Coghead’s customer relationships or obligations and, at this point in time, SAP does not have plans to continue offering the Coghead service commercially. However, in an effort to help Coghead customers transition to a new service provider without interrupting their business, existing customers will be able to access and use their applications and data through my.coghead.com until April 30, 2009. This will give you time for a smooth transition to a new service. In fact, there are already some great promotional offers out there for Coghead customers.
As a customer, you know that the Coghead platform provides one of the fastest and most efficient ways to develop applications. SAP saw great value in our technology. SAP also saw great value in our people. As part of the deal, many of the Coghead engineering and operations team have joined SAP as well.
Coghead began as an ambitious vision by Greg Olsen, Chelliah Thirunavukkarasu, and Bill Trento. Along the way, the company became a trendsetter in the cloud computing space and I want to thank all of our employees, customers and partners who contributed to turning Coghead from vision to reality.
As for me, I will not be joining SAP, and I cannot comment any further on SAP’s future plans for the technology or the details of the sale transaction. However, I wish my former colleagues the best of luck at their new home.
I also wish you the best of luck with your business, it has been a pleasure working with you.
Best regards,
Paul McNamara
To help out at least somehow Coghead customers this is the summing up of migration offers:
http://webappsa...-customers.html
Sorry to see Coghead go. We wish them all the best.
Zoho Creator is offering free consulting for Coghead customers. More details at Zoho blogs:
http://blogs.zo...ghead-customers
We look forward to helping you make a smooth transition to Zoho Creator.
Coghead joins the ranks of Teqlo. Whatajoke.
All of us here at TeamDesk pay our respect to CogHead team for creating a great product and our sympathy to CogHead customers who are now losing their applications platform.
If you are a CogHead customer, TeamDesk tried to automate your transition as much as possible
Try CogHead-to-TeamDesk migration tool http://www.team...et/coghead.html and watch your application migrated in minutes. Please contact TeamDesk support if you would need help to fine-tune it.
Coghead Import Tool: Release Notes:
http://blog.tea...t-relnotes.html
Our CEO and CTO recently recorded a podcast with tips companies should keep in mind when evaluating SaaS options. Coghead users may find these tips beneficial.
Check the post and podcast out here:
http://www.trac...3/02/saas-tips/
It’s sad to see a good thing die.
SAP bought Coghead in a few mils,
wait for the river
I tried Coghead.
I didn’t move apps to it.
Here’s why:
1. Technical – it didn’t have development capability I needed.
2. Support – When I asked questions in the forums about said lack of capability I was handed work arounds that weren’t rather than “nope. doesn’t do that yet, but we are working on it”.
3. Offsite Option for Sensitive Data – I have a few clients who have data they simply will not trust off site. CogHead should have engineered a platform that can be installed on servers. It could have still used their servers to route authentication and I would have been fine with that.
Poor management decisions imo.
Whatever you do, don’t even try Iceberg. They will hang you up to dry.
In these trying times, it isn’t the price of a commodity that matters the most, but the customer experience, and most importantly the trustworthiness of the people providing the product or service. The people behind Iceberg simply fails miserably in that aspect. They cannot keep promises, and actually keep on making and breaking their promises. They do not know how to manage customer expectations. They assure the customer that what was asked can be done, even if it cannot.
Let me ellaborate.
August 2008, I paid $400 to Fractis, Inc. (the people behind Iceberg). That was the downpayment for customizing a print module for the merchandising application we were building for a client. Iceberg’s current print capabilities are definitely not useable especially for invetory-type applications. Iceberg is unable to print to pre-defined, pre-printed forms. And that was a must!
I was already in doubt if it was doable, but I asked and the reply was that it was doable. We agreed on a price of $800. But yes it is my fault that no contract was signed. I simply put too much trust on this startup. I thought they were the type who really, genuinely were interested in seeing their application work for starters and small businesses.
In July 2009, after 11 months of false promises, I never saw the print module even after submitting our application several times, and creating an HTML template that was requested from us. The client had already backed out and was demanding for a refund. So I did the same.
I requested for refund, and until now, I have only received 50 euros back.
The people behind Iceberg do not value customer relationship. They don’t know how to reply to emails. They don’t know how to deal with deals gone bad. They have not refunded me in full, and they have stopped replying to my emails. The last I heard was that I will be fully refunded in 3 weeks time. This was last October 3.
This was getting old and I was tired of how I was being treated, so I decided to share my experience with as many people as possible. Don’t deal with Iceberg, if you value your time, your clients, your money.