Yesterday we reported on the shutdown of Coghead, a web-based enterprise software editor that featured an unusually intuitive interface. Today, we were contacted by the company’s CEO Paul McNamara, who informed us that software giant SAP, which previously had invested in the company, has acquired Coghead’s intellectual property assets. While Coghead will cease operations, much of the company’s team will join SAP (though McNamara will not be joining the company).

While SAP had previously invested in the company, its ultimate acquisition of Coghead is sure to raise a few eyebrows. SAP has long been associated with local enterprise software suites that require time-consuming upgrades and IT teams, and has had trouble coping with the pressure to lower its prices to reflect those offered by SaaS services like Salesforce.com (though SAP offers products that these SaaS solutions don’t).

To combat this attrition, the company recently began offering smaller upgrades, allowing customers to pick and choose the features they’d like to upgrade rather than having to spend time on large system overhauls. It has also been making strides to establish services in the cloud, which may explain the logic behind the Coghead acquisition.

Update: Some comments below note that the Wall Street Journal article referenced originally contained some inaccuracies, and that SAP may not be introducing the ’smaller updates’. However, the company is indeed expanding its presence in the cloud.

Here’s a portion of McNamara’s letter to 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.

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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.

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Intuit is joining a crowded field. Salesforce.com has its AppExchange and Force.com. Amazon has its Web services, including SimpleDB. Google just launched its App Engine. And startups like Coghead are also angling for position.

But Intuit already has a lot of small business customers that, in turn, can help it attract developers to its new platform. Bill Lucchini, the general manager of Quickbase tells me:

It is great to have a cool piece of technology, but we have to make sure that developers build successful businesses. Giving them the tools to get in front of our customers is strategy No. 1

He realizes that decent technology is just table stakes. Developers will get access to QuickBase via APIs to use as a foundation for their apps, and they also get hooks into QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting software that is used by nearly 25 million individuals in 3.6 million businesses in the U.S. alone. Developers will be able to build apps using Adobe Flex and the open-source Eclipse development environment. For the technically-minded, here is a screencast that goes into more details.

Although the economics have yet to be fully worked out, Intuit plans to charge using a utility model similar to Amazon’s that goes up the mnore resources a developer’s app consumes. Says Lucchini:

We are trying to price these things where developers can charge $10 to $20 per user per month and make a profit. Small businesses are pretty price sensitive.

The Web platform wars are in full swing. Which platform will developers flock to for enterprise apps?

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Bungee Labs

Orem, Utah based Bungee Labs offers Bungee Connect, a web-based Ajax environment for creating interactive web applications. Bungee Connect allows developers to “efficiently create and instantly deliver rich web applications for the small-to-medium business market” by providing an online environment where developers and clients don’t have to install anything. Bungee Connect also automates SOAP and REST based web services. See our February 2008 review of Bungee Connect here.

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Total funding to date was not available, with the previous rounds having been raised in August 2005 and November 2006.

(via PEHub)

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Bungee Connect , which leaves private beta today, competes with all of these. But the company, based in Utah, thinks they have the advanced features to attract a much different audience than most of those startups. They’re targeting hard core developers, not non-developers who want a way to create simple software programs to solve problems at the office.

Bungee Connect is a single online environment for developers to write, test, deploy and host applications. Like Force.com, it is a platform-as-a-service. The service is free until end users actually start using the products built and deployed on the service.

Dana Gardner wrote an excellent overview of the service a year ago when Bungee Connect was first introduced.

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The DaaS service consists of a new set of development tools and APIs that allow enterprise developers to harness cloud computing. The tools offer full access to the database, logic and user interface capabilities of the Force.com Platform, unifying development and IT collaboration tools with Force.com Platform-as-a-Service. The new service includes a Metadata API, Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Sandbox, and Code Share that all developers to build enterprise Software-as-a-Service applications.

The new pricing model includes a pay-per-login utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform and Development-as-a-Service. The model offers a cheaper alternative to companies that may use applications in the cloud less often, in theory making the service more affordable to use. Force.com cloud (per login) has a list price is $5.00 per login with a maximum of 5 logins per user per month, and will be offered at $0.99 per login to the end 2008. For more frequent users (more then 5 logins per month) must sign up to Force.com’s unlimited pricing plan of $50 per user per month.

Salesforce.com and Emergence Capital Partners have also announced a new competition, the Force.com $1 Million Challenge – a venture competition for entrepreneurs and companies building on the Force.com platform. Winners will receive a $1 million investment from Emergence Capital as well as space in Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Incubator facility for one year. The winner will be announced in November at Dreamforce 2008.

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Coghead is also now hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Web service. “Amazon knows a lot more about running data centers than we do,” CEO Paul McNamara says of the move to Amazon. The way he sees it, he is now offering an easy on-ramp for anyone who wants to create an Amazon-hosted application simply by using Coghead.

The move to Adobe Flex is what gives the site its performance boost. On Flex versus Ajax, McNamara says:

A lot of people are talking about Ajax, but we see a world that goes beyond Ajax.

What attracted him to Flex was the cross-platform, cross-browser interoperability and the prospect of creating offline apps with Adobe AIR. He expects to offer offline capabilities to Coghead users by the middle of 2008. Coghead has attracted 25,000 registered users since launching last April, but its ambition, says McNamara, is to go after the “50 million businesses that don’t have a server.” It still has a long way to go, but this upgrade should help it attract its next set of users.

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It is the exact same business model as Salesforce.com’s AppExchange. (Meanwhile, Salesforce is already moving into Coghead’s custom-application territory with Force.com, which it launched in September). Coghead faces other competition from Zoho Creator, Dabble DB, WyaWorks, and LongJump. The online database/app creation market is getting crowded, and there is only room for one or two platforms. Salesforce is already one of them. If Coghead can make it easier to develop Web apps for the enterprise than anyone else and attract a following, it’s got a shot at that coveted platform status. We’ll be keeping an eye on its progress.

Has anyone used Coghead? How does it compare to the competition? Please let us know in comments.

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Unless you already have a large audience like SalesForece, relying on users to create applications on your platform makes the service is somewhat useless until someone creates one. So, as promised earlier, LongJump has seeded their platform with a suite of applications that can be remixed by their users. The suite consists of 13 business applications that will be free to use through the end of the year. The applications include a collaboration suite and tools for customer management, sales, HR, and Finance.

Applications can be customized by anyone else. Customizations include adding or modifying new data objects such as creating a contact object or triggering new actions when information enters the system. For instance, if a contact is added, email the sales team about it. These modifications fork the application into your own private copy, which you can keep for yourself or share with others.

The collaboration suite, OfficeSpace, is the most complex of the applications and lets users share personal and group calendars, assign tasks, store documents, and collaborate through wikis. Each of the functions is organized under its own tab, with a master dashboard where each user can puts widgets of the pieces they’re interested in.

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At its core Force competes as a development platform with .NET, Java, etc. But there are also a slew of startups that have focused on allowing people to easily create and deploy database driven applications – DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. All will take a hit from Force. In fact, this may be sort of game ending for them. Salesforce has its eyes on much bigger fish than those startups.

Any internal process or function that requires custom software may be a candidate for Force. Disney, which has been testing the platform, is using it to manage character (Mickey Mouse, etc.) appearances. EA has built a recruiting application. Bronx School is using Force to manage attendance, performance, etc. Salesforce says they can actually manage the entire school on Force.

Salesforce is also announcing VisualSource, a set of tools that allow developers to build applications for multiple devices (tablets, iphone, etc.) and add HTML, AJAX and Flex to Force applications (making for much nicer looking and more user friendly applications). See the screen shot below for an example user interface.

Pricing is a flat $25/month/user.

Salesforce has always said its about software as a service. Next week, they say they’re deploying the platform as a service with Force. I imagine they’ll find a receptive customer base.

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Coglets let you embed any Coghead application you make on a web page. Coghead applications are database driven applications for inputting and outputting information from a database, created in a WYSIWYG interface aimed at tech savvy non-programmers. Coglets let you can expose bits of these programs, such as input and output, on your site with a single line of embed code.

With Coglets you’re able to do things like build an application that accepts and processes submissions, easily exposing an input form to applicants, an admin panel to administrators, and a table view of the completed data for everyone else. There are some examples of how people have been using them here (one emulates TechCrunch 20’s submission forms).

The applications are more than just input and output though, because you can specify rules and permissions for the program to carry out depending on the data it’s handling. For example, making it so that submissions have to be approved before being processed by another user. Because the applications are hosted, it also takes concerns of scaling off your hands.

A Coghead account costs about $49/month for five users. The new Coglets will cost $20 for each part of the application you want to embed, and will serve an unlimited number of users.

Here’s a demo of Coglets on the iPhone:

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I wrote in detail about Coghead last year. The company competes in the “online access” space (a reference to Microsoft Access). We’ve written about Coghead competitors in the past, including Dabble DB, Zoho Creator and WyaWorks. The primary use of these products is to create business applications that deal with everything from task tracking through to purchase orders.

What is special about CogHead is that users building applications with the product require less technical skills because the process is (mostly) all drag-and-drop and visual. CogHead is unique because of just how easy it is to create forms, views and apps – the design view allows users to create fields by dragging and dropping them onto a form. The user can lay the fields out and place them on the page, making the application they build more user friendly and easier on the eyes. Building the logic behind the forms is also a graphical process, the user takes objects and actions and drags them into a flow chart that is similar to a data-flow or logic diagram. There are a number of starter applications to help users get comfortable with the platform.

Coghead is also announcing today that 17,000 developers are now working on the platform.

The company has raised $11.2 million in two rounds of venture capital from American Capital Strategies Ltd., SAP Ventures and El Dorado Ventures. They have 21 employees in their Silicon Valley headquarters and another 15 in China.

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Today a new entrant has entered the space as Coghead announced the public launch of their visual app building service. Coghead promises many of the things that the other applications do – the ability to easily create, access and share applications. The primary use of these products is to create business applications that deal with everything from task tracking through to purchase orders. CogHead comes loaded with a set of ’starter applications’ such as a simple CRM, an issue tracker and recruitment management. These starter templates can then be edited and further refined by the user to suit their particular needs.

What is special about CogHead is that users building applications with the product require less technical skills because the process is all drag-and-drop and visual. CogHead is unique because of just how easy it is to create forms, views and apps – the design view allows users to create fields by dragging and dropping them onto a form. The user can lay the fields out and place them on the page, making the application they build more user friendly and easier on the eyes. Building the logic behind the forms is also a graphical process, the user takes objects and actions and drags them into a flow chart that is similar to a data-flow or logic diagram (see their screenshots). CogHead has a large set of user actions and events available meaning that a very broad range of custom apps can be built. Data can also be processed without a user making a direct action as there are events such as when data is imported etc.

Coghead has a unique and very visual user interface which lets tech-savvy, yet non-coders, easily add business logic to create or modify applications. Coghead says the sweet spot for their product is between packaged software solutions and custom programming, a market that is very large and one that has not yet been fully addressed.

What is confusing amongst all these apps is the terminology that is used. For instance, what developers know as a table or a view CogHead refers to as a ‘collection’ (referring to a collection of fields), all the other apps also have their own unique terminology and some are more confusing than others. Since this space is so competitive the players within it might want to think about standardizing the terminology used if they plan on attracting users away from one of their competitors (this has happened in the online CRM space which you can see if you put Salesforce and ZohoCRM side-by-side.)

Both Visual Basic and Microsoft Access were very popular application development environments, and if you look inside most businesses today you are likely to find some form of custom application developed with one of these Microsoft products. Currently there is no web equivalent of either of these apps, but as the trend towards web-based apps grows there will also be a growing demand to do for web apps what Visual Basic and Access did for desktop apps. To get to this point though the crop of products in the web-based space will need to improve a lot – for instance the applications can not be customized far enough in terms of look and feel and none of them produce apps that are as easy to use, learn and navigate as their custom built brethren are. This space is developing rapidly and I am sure that we will see these apps evolve further very quickly. CogHead is a great product that is pushing this market further forward making it very interesting, certainly a space to keep an eye on and a set of products that will one day be used by almost all businesses.

For more reviews of Coghead, see these early posts (while Coghead was still in beta) by Om Malik and Erick Schonfeld.

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