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.
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