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April 21, 2008
Coghead Intros EC2-Based Application Publishing Model
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 15 -- Coghead, a leading platform-as-a-service provider, today introduced the Coghead Gallery, an open-market exchange that provides a global forum for application creators to publish the applications developed with Coghead. The combination of Coghead's visual Web application development platform, sophisticated workflow capabilities, and new publishing model completely changes the way applications are created, marketed, and sold -- giving application publishers a way to compete in the open market without spending millions of dollars on technology and business infrastructures.
"Truly disruptive technologies allow a broad class of people to do what previously only a very elite class could do. Today, ISVs are a very elite class of companies -- not because they have cornered the market on good ideas, but rather because they have access to capital to turn ideas into a business. The Coghead Gallery, coupled with the Coghead platform, allows a broad class of technology companies to become application providers -- no venture capital required. And we believe this will be very disruptive to the elite class of software companies that today have a lock on the application market," said Paul McNamara, Coghead's CEO.
Using Coghead's 100-percent Web-based platform, developers, tech-savvy business users, and IT professionals can quickly create a wide range of Web-based business applications and publish them via the Gallery. The Gallery supports two distinct application publishing models:
- The Open Definition model allows any application creator to publish applications that anyone can freely modify, distribute, and use. This model harnesses the power of community and accelerates innovation, allowing users to collaborate to improve the applications. Coghead has created and published a set of Open Definition applications for members to use for free.
- The Protected Definition model allows Coghead business partners to create applications that they sell to customers. This model allows Coghead partners to leverage their unique domain expertise to create and monetize applications. With Coghead, partners create applications, open a store front on Coghead.com/Apps, sell those applications to a worldwide audience, and build software-as-a-service businesses without venture capital investment.
Today, Coghead.com is among the top five percent of most-visited Web properties worldwide, and partners benefit from a large and growing Coghead community. Coghead started recruiting partners at the end of last year and launched the Gallery with the participation of more than 30 partners, a number that is expected to grow rapidly. Application publishers that choose to join Coghead's Partner Program receive special benefits:
- Customizable storefronts offering enhanced marketing opportunities.
- Automated business-operations capabilities that make application-subscription billing effortless.
- Software-as-a-service distribution, which enables application developers previously limited by geography to compete on a global stage without investing in technology infrastructure.
- Reliable application delivery that leverages Amazon's cloud-computing platform and Adobe's Flex/Flash rich internet application (RIA) technology for a favorable user experience.
"Coghead helped me create a new business model that enables me to do what I do best -- create custom applications -- and extend beyond my geographical region without additional operational expenses," said Christopher Shockey, lead developer at Hekademia Consulting. "Coghead has a sophisticated development platform that enables me to create custom, online applications, and the new Gallery gives me the marketing and subscription-management resources I need to run a successful SaaS business."
An Array of Applications
The Coghead Gallery already has several applications from which users can choose. Applications range from general expense tracking, simple project management, and basic contact management to very specific, customized solutions, such as a private-capital management system. For more information, visit the Gallery at www.coghead.com/apps.
About Coghead
Coghead provides a radically new way for tech-savvy businesspeople to create, manage, and deploy their own Web-based applications. The Coghead service enables the users closest to a business challenge to create customized solutions in hours or days at a fraction of the cost of large packaged applications or custom development projects. Founded in May 2003 and funded by American Capital, El Dorado Ventures, and SAP, Coghead is staffed by industry veterans, serial entrepreneurs, and some of the brightest minds in software. For more information, visit the company's Web site at www.coghead.com and the company's blog at blog.coghead.com.
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Source: Coghead
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