Thursday, April 30, 2009

Wolf Frameworks to participate & demonstrate designing & delivering a situational application LIVE at the RaDD 09 showdown contest



The RaDD showdown 09 contest dates are now confirmed and I must say it’s going to be an exciting morning for all of us at Wolf Frameworks. Nothing feels better than getting a targeted audience and the opportunity to show off our product/technology in the marketplace and get more feedbacks.

For all my friends & partners who are still unaware; Powerinthecloud, the Situational Application Resource Center is organizing a LIVE contest called RaDD Showdown 09 to demonstrate how different PaaS-based RADD (Rapid Application Development and Deployment) platforms are capable of building complex business applications in a spectacularly short period of time, increase customer awareness and show how different PaaS platforms fit into the hands of different users groups to deliver different functionality.

In the true spirit of the PaaS community, the organizers have pulled down the idea of ranking/benchmarking vendors against each other, decided to go with an independent evaluation of the submitted solution and have only allowed submitting a single application running on a specific vendor’s platform to reduce the noise and room for hurried judgmental errors. I guess this gives us a rare opportunity to showcase those small little things in our product which makes our customers smile – which otherwise would have never showed up against a direct feature to feature comparison.

Like any other competition, this too will bring some key product packaging & positioning questions for us and I will briefly touch upon some points later, but hey – Here’s an opportunity to be visible without burning a dollar, participate in growing the community, chance to answer the common myths around our product segment & wrongly perceived drawbacks and distinguish ourselves from others and share more. The more you share, the more people like you and the more they follow --- Remember: Twitter :)

Do all the PaaS vendors offer similar technology to participate in such a generic PaaS evaluation program? I don’t think so. On the contrary, we must be very different to co-exist together in such an economic condition. Are all the different PaaS vendors going to deliver - complete word-to-word specification within 6 hours time? I don’t think so but we will attempt to deliver a key working solution model around the business case using our PaaS. Will other users find it easy to tweak our functionality, change the software design or add another report easily? I don’t think so. Most of us have developed the system keeping different target users in mind (Developers/Business Analyst/End Users/etc) – and I am sure we have our own terms, vocabulary and have our learning curve to explain how things are done internally. However easy and DIY friendly we are – we choose to be different and no competition can benchmark us as right or wrong.

Design considerations & tradeoffs against a certain delivery target are always crucial for a framework. Flexibility and delivery capabilities are like two sides of a same coin, pretty similar to Packaging and Positioning. At Wolf we have encapsulated development layer & empowered business analyst to design business applications easily – we have ‘Packaged’ our product to fit into a particular ‘Place’ in the marketplace. It might become obvious that even a BA might hit limitations while working on our platform and then the obvious question is: Who are the other users we are accommodating to fulfill which functions of our system delivery capabilities. Have we added the ability for developers to change and play a role inside the system? How encapsulated and how open we are for different users will also help to determine how we perform in a generic PaaS evaluation program.

All said & done, this is going to a great exercise. How many times you get a velvet carpet to show your product to a well informed partner and user community and see how others deal with the same challenge as you go thru. This is our chance to develop the next Lego Style - PaaS Mindstorms. Only this time -- it’s not going to be one platform. Many platform, many users and many ROBOTS to walk the talk. See you all soon…

Cheers,

Sunny Ghosh
Director & CEO
Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Monday, April 27, 2009

Differentiating Wolf SaaS Designing Platform vs. Traditional App Development

I get to answer this question all the time. Let me share a quick overview for our partners and customers on how they benefit using Wolf SaaS Application Platform. And why does the world want to create Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) type Business Applications? I will skip this obvious explaination for today.

Let me remind you; whether it’s Enterprise Developers, Business Analysts, Organization Process Managers or ISV Developers – the value that our platform brings to the table lies in our ability to create smarter, better and interoperable business process driven SaaS applications – Rapidly with lesser cost using the Wolf ‘Standards’ driven Platform. We do this by:

1. Offering our browser based code free environment to design and deliver applications over the Cloud (Develop and Deliver)

2. What typically will take months can now be achieved within weeks with additonal customization .

3. What used to be very technical – is made lot simpler with Wolf. It’s no more about code; it’s about point and click configurations and a great design. No DEVELOPMENT required!

4. We help you to innovate without worrying about existing infrastructures and manage your business needs & changes more efficiently.

5. With zero annual maintenance fees, we deliver new cool features and tools to make your life a lot easier.

6. We help to dramatically lower your TCO (Software Licensing, Hardware, Bandwidth, Development Time, Deployment, Access & Maintenance) and reduce your risk on investments.

7. We provide 24/7/365 service availability with high SLA's so that you can scale your business and even get hands-on assistance from our Partner community to design your business solutions rapidly.

8. Don’t get us wrong, we don’t sell softwares… We only rent our framework for building other softwares

If you wanted to put this down in a comparative chart, perhaps this is how it will look:



Our motivation behind giving a totality to the Platform is targeted towards making life a lot easier for our partners to service their customers within limited budgets and time. In delivering these functionalities, we did not take the easier route, which was? Tie all of the elements: the user interface, business rules, database, hosting and the API’s together – we kept them quiet separate and as loosely bound as we can.

Which means, you could do many things with one technology platform without being restricted. While this is more of a technical differentiation, customers gain financially a lot more using Wolf than any other SaaS Development Platform. Here’s a how you gain financially:

Financial Differentiation




The key advantages for your organization:

1. One Platform for SaaS Application Designing and Deployment
2. Spend Less Money, RBI (Return Before Investment)
3. Higher Efficiency - reduced cost with Rapid Implementation Cycle
4. Personalized, Easy to Customize further
5. No maintenance Fee, Better Service, Nothing to manage or monitor
6. 'Standards' Driven Platform which allows you to work across multiple data sources & systems

I am happy to share more in my next post and hope this one provides a outline on how you can benefit using Wolf. Until then, don't forget to register & give us a try for your next SaaS Application requirement.

Cheers,

Sunny Ghosh
Director & CEO
Wolf Platform-as-a-Service

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Monday, April 13, 2009

Access Help Documentation and Live Technical Support Service...

Designing application on Wolf Platform just got easier with the recently released 'Quick Help and Support Service' section. Targeted to guide you with consistent help through documentations in the form of User Guides (.pdf format), searchable FAQs and Videos, more and more documentation-reference manuals are being added on a weekly basis.

Registered users can also contact our Live Technical Support through 'Ask support' section via their account or by dropping an email at support@wolfframeworks.com. The Live Technical Support is made available from Monday to Friday during IST and CET working hours and is aimed towards providing technical assistance on designing & working on Wolf Platform and achieving functionalities which helps you to move forward...

We hope you benefit and enjoy the service...