This InformationWeek article took artistic license to lofty new levels in a single sentence as it described the demise of Cloud Computing PaaS vendor Coghead and the subsequent IP/Engineering purchase by SAP:
Bad news for cloud computing: Coghead -- a venture-backed, online application development platform -- is closing, leaving customers with a problem to solve.
It's indeed potentially bad news for Coghead's customers who as early adopters took a risk by choosing to invest in a platform startup in an emerging technology sector. It's hardly indicative of an established trend that somehow predicts "bad news for Cloud Computing" as a whole.
It's a friendly reminder that "whens you rolls da dice, you takes your chances." Prudent and pragmatic risk assessment and relevant business decisions still have to be made when you decide to place your bets on a startup. Just because you move to the Cloud doesn't mean you stop employing pragmatic common sense. I hope these customers have a Plan B.
This is the problem again with lumping all of the *aaS'es into a bucket called Cloud; are we to assume Amazon's AWS (IaaS) and SalesForce.com (SaaS) are going to shutter next week? No, of course not. Will there be others who close their doors and firesale? Most assuredly yes, just like there are in most tech markets.
Here's what Coghead's CEO (in the same article, mind you) explained as the reason for the closure:
Though McNamara said business was continuing to grow rapidly, the recession ultimately did Coghead in, and Coghead began looking for buyers a few months ago. "Faced with the most difficult economy in memory and a challenging fundraising climate, we determined that the SAP deal was the best way forward for the company," McNamara wrote in a letter to customers that went out late Thursday
That's correct kids, even the almighty Cloud, the second coming of computing, is not immune to the pressures of running a business in a tough economy, especially the platform business...
First it was hype around the birth of Cloud and now it's raining epitaphs. I call dibs on Amazon's SAN arrays!
/Hoff