Rafe Needleman continued his developers-in-the-cloud theme at the Microsoft campus this afternoon, with an Under the Radar judging panel that includes First Round Capital's very own Rob Hayes.
Here are the presenters, roughly in my order of personal preference:
Twilio
helps developers to build and run voice applications cheaply. Their core XML
API offers the basics used in most voice applications. Grand Central
uses Twilio, as does Earth 911, which turned a six-month project into
just a few hours. Telephony in the cloud changes the typical telephony
business model, just as Amazon EC2 changed the cost of online app
provisioning. Most telephony is based on the number of lines you have,
and how frequently those lines are being used, so you pay for capacity
you aren't using and can't handle spikes in demand. Twilio transforms
this into an EC2-like model in which clients pay as they go for what
they use. I was easily charmed by CEO Jeff Lawson (who no doubt could sell snow in Alaska), and bought his argument that there's emerging demand for voice integration into web applications.
New Relic supports Ruby in the cloud, in what the company claims is the 'first application management solution offered via SaaS.'
Need to know what your app is doing at runtime, and how you can fix
them in production. Real-time visibility while running production
applications. Independent developers and hobbyists are drawn to Ruby,
and New Relic aims to capture those users as they get started in their
development careers. Launched in Hune, now over 1600 customers,
inluding businesses as diverse as github and Hot Topic.
Average customer paying 50% more than they did six months ago for their
New Relic subscription. Though the company has raised $11M, they're
being frugal - they've only used $3M of that to date and still have
three years of cash in bank.
Heroku offers a multi-tenant platform to 'enhance developer productivity and make deployment trivial.' Heroku, a Y-Combinator company, supports enterprises, web 2.0 companies, and individual Ruby developers with provisionless hosting - over 25,000 applications are now deployed over the Heroku platform. The metered service ranges in cost from $50/month for an individual developer, to $10K/month for an enterprise, and the company compares this to $5K/month for a sysadmin and server resources. I like Heroku - its simplicity is seductive - but they will have a fight on their hands as existing enterprise vendors develop offerings for their Ruby customers.
RunMyProcess offers business process management (BPM) in the cloud. They address the challenge of SaaS integration with 'workflows as a service.' Design, execution, traceability, and analysis are all part of RunMyProcess-enabled workflow. A basic subscription is 50 euros/user/month, and RMP partners can earn a 20% revenue share. I see the need for the service, but have many questions on their competitive landscape and differentiation.
