Caspio Celebrates 10 Years of Cloud Innovation
Ten years ago about this time I terminated my early retirement to get back to the startup world to work on my vision of a code-free application development platform.
A year later Caspio Bridge 1.0 hit the market. It was a modest start, but we had built a Microsoft Access equivalent for the web. Initially the backend was an Oracle database and the middle tier was in Visual Basic. But the front-end was the most sophisticated AJAX user interface anywhere.
Most importantly, it delivered on the promise of allowing users to build web forms and searchable databases quickly and without coding. Our still-unique JavaScript deployment model meant that users could place these forms and apps on their own websites while Caspio remained their database and application engine entirely behind the scene.
The first release of Caspio Bridge went live in 2001. Since then we have kept improving the platform by adding capabilities that our customers have asked us to add. We have certified the platform in several ways including PCI certification that Microsoft Azure lacks, and have made it perhaps the most robust platform for building web applications available anywhere.
Today we power over 300,000 apps for companies as large as Fortune-500 conglomerates to small one-person shops, universities, government agencies and non-profits in the US and over 40 other countries. Caspio is the de facto standard in the online news category where over 80% of the largest American newspaper websites use Caspio to build community applications, publish government and local data and to accept citizen submissions and feedbacks.
I contribute our accomplishments to mainly two factors. First is perseverance. Caspio survived two economic downturns and initially slow customer adoption, but we persevered. In our guts we knew this is the future, it's just that we are early. The second factor is that we never raised any external financing. To date Caspio is free from Venture Capital investment. We don't even lease equipment. Our operation is entirely funded by our own revenues. We have no "run-way" that is about to end. This gives us the freedom to do what we must do, and that is serving our customers. Some of the competitors who raised VC funding are no longer around, because when going got tough, VC's backed out and the company was shut down.
Caspio is now stronger than ever before. We feel that we're just warming up. The world has begun to notice and understand the concept of Cloud Computing. Companies of all sizes realize that they need to establish their own cloud strategy. It's exciting times for Caspio which has been working on this vision for 10 years.
Innovation, the Real Benefit of Cloud Computing
The National Institute of Standards and Technology cites the following as the benefits of Cloud Computing:
- eliminates upfront capital expenditures and dramatically reduces the administrative burden on IT resources,
- allows organizations to add and subtract capacity as their needs change and to pay only for what they use,
- provides reliable services, large storage and computing capacity, and 24/7 service,
- enables agency IT resources to focus on business-critical applications,
- means organizations are no longer faced with choosing between obsolete equipment and software and high upgrade costs; they are always using current technology.
Sure, no one can argue with any of these, however what we have come to see firsthand at Caspio again and again is that the simplicity and the low cost of building apps in the cloud fosters creativity and innovation the likes of which has never existed.
No longer big budgets or advanced technical skills are a requirement to bring new novel ideas to the market. No longer must business professionals get complete buy-in of corporate IT departments to introduce a new efficiency or a new automation to the enterprise. That's the true benefit of the Cloud Computing that can propel business and government forward.
Where Does Your Time Go?
During the last days of 2009 I made an effort to teach my two oldest daughters who are 12 and 10, the value of goal setting. To make it exciting, I bought each of them their own particularly nice note book exclusively dedicated to writing their goals in.
Working with them to set goals for themselves turned out to be an easier task than I had prepared myself for. We worked together to set goals in each of the seven major areas of life: Health, Family, Financial, Intellectual, Social, Professional, and Spiritual. The kids had a lot of great ideas, albeit most of it was about all the places they wanted to visit, and once they got the hang of setting SMART goals, they were on their way to come up with their goals.
Of course the real work just began. They must develop the habit of breaking their big goals into smaller actionable tasks, measuring their results and refining their process. So far, 3 days into the New Year, things are going well. They have already started some of their new activities.
The truth is that how we spend our time determines what we get out of our life. There is an interesting interactive chart on New York Times’ website that shows how people tend to spend their time.
Source: New York Times - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080801-metrics-graphic.html
The question for all of us is, where does our time go? We better have our own written goals and make sure a good amount of our times goes toward small actions that get us closer to them.
How will a web page look like 10 years from now?
If you are in the web business you may have considered this question before. It can have a significant impact on your business. Those who get ahead of the curve can gain handsomely from it. Look at Tim O'Reilly and his Web 2.0 ideas.
On one hand more and more non-pc devices are used to browse the web. Then you have a fast growth in video on the web and phenomena such as Twitter.
Love to hear what you think.
Caspio Launches Official Blog
Last week, Caspio launched its official Company Blog. Besides covering industry topics and company news, the new blog will provide tips and tricks on database application creation, feature showcases, and customer successes. Add it to your RSS and stay in the loop!
Government Turning to Cloud Computing
Last week, the Obama administration presented its plans to utilize cloud computing to reduce federal IT costs and accelerate innovation. The shift to hosted information management will allow the federal government to free up some of the $75 billion it currently spends on IT, $19 billion of which is taxpayer dollars.
The U.S. Postal Service is already ahead of the curve, recently signing an enterprise-level agreement with Caspio. USPS manages 34,000 retail locations and delivers to every address in the nation – but unlike other agencies, it doesn’t rely on tax dollars to pay for operating expenses. Caspio Bridge will undoubtedly help USPS reduce costs and IT backlogs, while improving information processing time.
Caspio currently serves many government offices at all levels, and the maturity of the platform lends itself well to the strict security and service-level requirements in this sector. Caspio Bridge offers control for all intricate procedures involving secure data storage, organization and retrieval. The platform itself employs multiple layers of security including top-of-the-line firewalls, data encryption, and hosting at a leading SAS-70 certified datacenter. Learn more about our platform security and reliability.
It’s exciting to see a positive shift towards cloud computing at the federal level. Caspio has seen great success with our Fortune-500, SMB, media and education customers, and we look forward to empowering more government organizations as they move to the cloud. Caspio invites government agencies to request a demo today.
Customer Spotlight: Enterprise Rollout Across Gannett
Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the United States, has partnered with Caspio. They own a total of 934 publications, including news giant USA Today, and 23 TV stations which reach 20 million households. According to Nielson, Gannett's total U.S. web audience is over 27.1 million unique visitors. Read the announcement.
We have been working individually with over 50 of Gannett's newspaper and TV sites since 2006, empowering them to roll out apps that increase traffic to their sites. It's exciting to see them use Caspio to find new and innovative ways to generate community interaction at a local level.
Michael Jesse at IndyStar.com, one of Gannett's largest newspaper websites, says: "You guys have the product we need right now, and you also have a great team of people behind it."
Five Misconceptions about Building Apps in the Cloud
Over the years since we first started Caspio in 2000, we've grown accustomed to hearing disbelief from new users when they experience how easily they can create their own web apps without coding or software. And even as cloud computing gains momentum and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) becomes more mainstream, it's remarkable to still frequently hear so many common misunderstandings from new users and so-called "experts" alike. I'll try to tackle some of them here, primarily from Caspio's perspective.
Misconception #1: Only simple apps are possible without coding
Depends how you define simple. You can certainly create a massively scalable, multi-faceted, multi-user, highly-interactive app on Caspio and integrate it with several other online apps and internal systems and load it with millions of records. On the other hand, games and other intensely graphical apps are not as well-suited on Caspio's more structured database-centric app platform.
Misconception #2: Cloud apps are a temporary Band-Aid
The idea being that to build a "real" app for the long haul, you should go back to traditional coding. Not so! While it's true that application development platforms (including Caspio's) have their own unique strengths and approach to solving business problems, by no means are Caspio-powered apps a temporary stop-gap. We have countless customers who have built mission-critical enterprise applications since 2001, when our platform first launched, and continue to expand their usage today.
Misconception #3: Hosted applications pose security and reliability risks
Security and reliability are a big deal as they should be. But if you do proper due diligence in selecting your platform, you could be assured that the security and reliability achieved through your cloud partner is typically above and beyond what's available in most companies. Caspio is known in the industry for its leadership in enterprise-grade security and reliability measures. Read about our specific measures and policies here.
Misconception #4: Long-term apps are most cost effective when built in-house
What many don't realize is that once you roll out an app, someone has to continuously host it, monitor its uptime, update its security, back up its data, apply upgrades, and deal with feature requests whenever necessary. When you leverage a hosted platform like Caspio's, you automatically benefit from all the built-in maintenance, upgrades, support and economy of scale … without even having to think about it. Once you put these expenses into your ROI analysis you see that unless you are willing to make sacrifices in post-development operational quality, running your app on your own is not more cost effective than working with a well chosen cloud partner.
Misconception #5: Non-developers can't build powerful apps
After many many years studying computer science at school, the mere thought that a web-based tool could make my skills redundant is disheartening to say the least. But cloud platforms are not meant to be a drag-and-drop replacement to ingenuity … they are accelerators and innovators.
Platform-as-a-service offerings are much like point-and-shoot cameras. They are increasingly smart in that they automatically find your subject, zoom in on them, adjust the shutter speed and so on, so all you have to do is to push the button. The result is a fairly nice photograph. Now is it as good as one taken by a professional photographer? Certainly not. But most pictures don't require professional photography skills to turn out delightfully beautiful. Furthermore, just by spending an hour learning your camera's user manual to get down the basic features of lighting, framing and movement, you can improve your picture quality dramatically.
In the world of application creation, Caspio is that point-and-shoot camera. The truth is that Caspio doesn't make anyone a programmer. However, it does provide an easy way to implement your ideas. The trick is in planning and architecting your app. For that, Caspio offers free project consultations, customer training and technical support. So when you combine an easy-to-use tool with an eager-to-help support team to back you up, you bet that you can build powerful apps without knowing how to write programs.
Point-and-click app building is here and it's only getting better. We have been focused on this for the past nine years and have seen thousands of fantastic app ideas get implemented without a single line of code. There used to be a time that only professional typesetters could create nice looking publications. Nowadays, my elementary school child uses Word to create great looking documents. Similarly, you now can create web forms and apps fast and without programming. If you haven't tried it yet, you should!
Caspio Spotlight: The Herald & Review
The Herald & Review in Decatur, Ill., wanted to add an interactive component to the already successful print coupon campaign being used by the newspaper. The idea was to offer something extra to advertisers and to boost page views on the Herald-Review.com Web site. So it used Caspio's tools to create an online coupon page that delivered on both counts. Despite a scarcity of the sophisticated coding skills needed to create a database, the staff experienced easy going using Caspio Bridge. It let them do the job themselves to create an attractive and effective online application. All that work on their part is good news for you because the Herald-Review is willing to share the finished web app for free with other Caspio clients [Request the App]. That means no development time on your part, yet you can reap all the rewards by using an application that's already been real world tested - now that's a sure recipe for success. Or, if you prefer, you can easily create your own web app with Caspio's leading do-it-yourself database platform. Caspio makes it easy for anyone by furnishing the right tools to do the job and plenty of real time support for the times you need some quick assistance.
Source: http://herald-review.com/coupons/
QUICKBITS: Bridget Sibthorp-Moecker, Webmaster, The Herald-Review
"We have a printed coupon piece we do four times a year. We call it 'Top Ads.' We wanted something to go with it that was interactive and that included the 'e-mail to a friend' functionality. Caspio provided the right tools to get the job done quickly and economically.
"We had one main goal with the coupon page - and that was page views. We started right off with 3,000 page views a month. That's good for something we are just starting out. And as the awareness grows, so will the response.
"I really like using Caspio. And when I needed help in the beginning, I found that Caspio's online chat feature was a very quick way to get answers to my questions. And, I'll tell you; the people at Caspio are knowledgeable. We've been able to solve every problem we ran into using the chat function."