7.3.1 | Blogs

February 04, 2008 | The On-Demand Difference, part I

By Noah Logan
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The On-Demand difference, API's, 3rd party services and exstensibility.

In the marketplace for web content management systems, we hear from customers that the range of solutions and choices is overwhelming.  They are often confused by the seemingly wide range of 'hosted' CMS.  While many vendors offer options to use their installable software "as-a-service", they are are not running an On-Demand business.  In contrast, Clickability developed from the first line of code and first piece of hardware a true On-Demand platform.

As this CMSWatch article suggests, solution seekers must educate themselves about the very big difference between On-Demand and managed-service/ASP solutions.  Today, among On-Demand solutions, an even smaller number of providers are able to deliver the product, infrastructure and professional services necessary to meet enterprise level needs.  Tony Byrne starkly points out in a follow up post that when working with an On-Demand solution, you are "choosing much more than technology" - we could not agree more.  In addition to the important contract end-of-life processes he highlights, we believe the extensibility of the solution and a diverse partner ecosystem are also key considerations.

The increased depth of coverage of SaaS by analysts is a welcome departure from years past, though, as with other market disrupting technologies, people still struggle to make sense of how deep the change.  Jarrod Gingras of CMSWatch recently posited that for a CMS software company, outside investment brings financial stability and product instability.  In the traditional commercial software model, this may be the case, though in the On-Demand world, it simply does not hold true.  SaaS solutions undergo consistent, evolutionary change, with 4-6 substantive releases per year, driven by a much stronger direct customer feedback loop, which people find to be a significant benefit of the solution, not something fearful.  As we announced today, Clickability did indeed secure an $8M round of Shasta Ventures led investment, which is an investment in sales growth and continued sensible evolution of the platform.  Simply put, for Clickability, raising money does not and and will not equate with product instability.

Getting back to the ecosystem and extensibility thread, another post on CMSWatch (last one, I promise!) recently touched on the "Geo-web" and Clickability partner, MetaCarta. We see a growing ecosystem that can add value to content with geo (MetaCarta), semantic (Inform), translation (SDL) and social filtering (Loomia) services.  With the Clickability platform, such services can be easily leveraged via the flexibility of the Clickability template language, or more deeply by using the Clickability content API to un-load, mark-up/tag/parse/modify, and re-load content.  Providing customers the ability to more effectively leverage 3rd party applications and their own development efforts we think of this as Innovation-as-a-Service, the capstone of our On-Demand platform.

 
With customers already using the Clickability platform in conjunction with these emerging partner services, their own legacy systems and new innovative development, the value of best-practices being baked into our On-Demand solution grows each day. Next week, we'll describe some specific customer examples.

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