| By Christopher Keene |
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| December 10, 2009 04:00 PM EST |
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Cloud Foundry at Cloud Expo
I have had some interesting conversations recently with partners about how cloud computing will affect the developer tools market.
I don't believe developers jump on a band wagon just because they like the wagon. They jump on the wagon because they like where the wagon is going!
Roughly every 10 years, a technology disruption changes developer aspirations and drives them to adopt new tools that get them to new places.
With client/server, developers aspired to build "modern" apps and break free of the bureaucracy of central IT.
Cloud computing offers a similar, updated, value - deploy web applications without the hassle of central IT.
Developer aspirations are changing - this is the underlying market driver for WaveMaker.
At the same time, IT vendors are seeing their value disrupted. As the data center morphs into a set of APIs, decisions which used to be made by sys admins and DBAs are made by the developer (Cloud Foundry is a good example of this).
The developer platform is becoming the control panel for the data center - this is the WaveMaker's value to partners. This is also the basis for our cloud quick start program with IBM, Amazon and RightScale.
One company that has realized the competitive opportunity in cloud computing is Microsoft. By integrating Visual Studio with Azure, they have created a powerful engine from which to attack the entire data center infrastructure.
If business developers really do "take to the clouds", the challenge I see for IT infrastructure providers is how to harness changing developer aspirations to ensure that the cloud deployment stack includes their solutions.
Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). Chris was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.After leaving Persistence Software in 2005, Chris spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business-intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school.
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