PaaS Channel Strategies

Over the past several weeks we have had many conversations about how to build our business with various people. One of the strategies that we have consistently discussed and are very bullish about is the strategy of building strong relationships with those companies building websites and web apps. In other words, engaging with companies like: design shops, agencies and software consultancies.

We are excited about this targeting strategy because these types of companies have the access to a regular stream of new projects and the budgets associated with them. We are also excited because of the benefit that we can deliver in return. Benefits ranging from speed to market, to added end customer benefit (lower operational costs) to code reusability, and last but definitely not least, a potential recurring revenue stream through revenue sharing, are resulting in interest from most we have talked to date.

One company that we are currently exploring a strategic relationship opportunity with is BCM. BCM is a large, 11 year old, Mexico based technology consultancy with a broad range of services and a consistently impressive annual growth rate. Last week, after working with Miguel Caron (CEO of BCM International), BCM began helping us develop an application on the RSP. At the same time, the plan is to have their developers evaluate the RSP while they work with it.

The goal of this project is to have BCM identify the types of projects that they deem to be well suited for the platform so that they can leverage its power to deliver those projects more quickly, efficiently and with the potential of generating recurring revenue in future. We are very excited about the early results and thank Miguel and his team for the referrals they have past on to us over the last couple of weeks.

Other companies that we have talked to include: Eric and Sylvain of iWeb, Stephen Walsh of Sinodev, and Niko Leger and Karim Barbir of PhiVision. Each has provided their own unique and valuable perspective on what we are doing at Reasonably Smart. PhiVision is considering building a relatively simple website on the RSP and the others are looking at how the RSP would benefit (or not) their business.

Fundamentally, the early positive response solidifies our belief that there is an additional method for building a business like Reasonably Smart over and above just driving adoption in the developer community.

Consultancies, agencies and design shops are in our sights and we are going to do our best to capitalize on the opportunity with them.

All up and running again...

Basically, our hosting provider got DoSd. Once we have funding in place, and our hardware is built out, we won't suffer this again, but for now, you have our apologies.

Working through it...

Just checking a disk and then we should be able to be back on line. Sorry for the delay.

Issues

We're currently experiencing a problem at our data center. I'll keep updating this with news until we're back up.

Web2.0 NY Participation -- Better Late...

About 15 days ago, James and I attended Web2.0 Expo and Interop in NY city. We have been very busy since the conferences building our business so, there really has been little time for reflection. However, it is worth a post to quickly recap how these shows acted as validation for our new venture. Over and above just meeting many great people and having several in depth discussions, there were several moments that further solidified our belief that we are definitely onto something big and more importantly, valuable here.

First, we attended a panel discussion called Building in the Clouds: Scaling Web 2.0. Although it was a pretty general talk about PaaS and Cloud computing what was positive was the panel make-up.

The panel members represented the large and the small, the established and the emerging and they all had a singular message...

Cloud/Platform Computing is going to continue to provide more and more value to those who develop and deploy web applications.

The conversation focused on the value proposition of the cloud and many strong points in favour were made. However, despite the bias of the panel, there were also many valid concerns brought to the forefront with guidance for navigating these concerns.

At Interop, I was fortunate enough to catch Peter Laird's talk on The Taxonomy of On-Demand Computing, where he did a fantastic of organizing the mess that is, the term cloud computing. Anyone who is interested in figuring out who sits where in the cloud needs to check out his blog post where he graphically illustrates the industry (unfortunately I do not think he included Reasonably Smart yet - we are eagerly awaiting the October update).

We were also fortunate enough to carve out 30 minutes of Tim O'Reilly's time to bring him up to speed on what we have completed since his keynote mention of us at this year's OSCON in July. He told us to keep him informed of our progress and we certainly will.

There was what could be considered a 'meeting of the minds' when we sat down with Dwight Merriman, CEO of 10gen. 10gen is easily our closest competition in the PaaS space but, this did not stop us from leaving our discussion agreeing to work together moving forward. How, you ask? Well the starting point is to get together to begin defining JavaScript on the server standards. It's a good idea for both of us and funny enough while speaking with Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana yesterday, he also expressed interest. We are targeting late October to kick this project off.

Finally, we were invited to moderate the cloud computing component of Interop's Unconference by Alistair Croll. At its most intense, there were 20 - 25 people hotly debating issues like security within the cloud, the differences between clouds and whether or not it would really be possible to broker the world's excess server capacity.

One thing that nobody was debating... if there is value in the cloud. This, for us, is a good thing.

First Reasonablysmart.com Customer Site

We at Reasonably Smart are proud to announce that we now have our first customer site up and running on the Reasonably Smart Platform (RSP) - http://trientje.reasonablysmart.com/. The site is owned by Katrien Janin - Designer and Usability expert extraordinaire.

As many of you close to the company know, Katrien is the wife of Reasonably Smart's founder and CTO, James Duncan. Given this fact, it's a special kind of validation for me that despite the husband and wife thing, she trusts and believes in the platform enough to host her newly launched business website. Tremendous!

In other customer news, on Monday of this week we launched a project where we are working with an accomplished group of Montreal-based software executives to deliver a comprehensive social network application. We are very excited about this project and hope to deliver the beta by the middle to 3rd week of October. Once operational, this customer's application is sure to showcase much of what the RSP has to offer.

Reasonably Smart Pricing Model

To date we have not talked much about how Reasonably Smart will generate revenue. This post is an overview of what our revenue model will look like once the billing engine is turned on.

Reasonably Smart plans to employ a utility model for the use of its platform. We will be charging users of the platform for the consumption of server cycles, storage and bandwidth. Our pricing for Storage and Bandwidth will be competitive with what is being provided through Amazon's EC2 and S3 offering.

Where Reasonably Smart differentiates significantly from most of the Platform as a Service and Hhardware Cloud providers is in how we are charging for processing or what we call server cycles. Here we will be charging at the micro-unit level so the user of the platform literally only pays for what they use.

We have completed some testing that demonstrated that a typical directory web site that receives 20K hits per month would cost the operator between $5 and $6 per month. Keep in mind that this testing was done on a $20/month box located at Slicehost that has not been optimized in anyway.

One area where this model provides benefit is during development of an application or a website. Because the developer does their coding in their own environment he or she will not incur any costs until they push the code back to the platform to execute their tests or run their application. We anticipate that this will save those who do a significant amount of prototyping a great deal of money.

This model will also save the small website owner (the hardware store, etc.) money. If they only get a few 100 hits per month then instead of paying for the base package (like the $20 per month we are paying at Slicehost) they could end up paying pennies.

For the large applications or those that go viral the model provides linear cost predictability at the hit (URL) level. We anticipate that this will be a significant strategic advantage for our enterprise users.