The news as of the second cup of coffee this morning, and the music is Arlo Guthrie's "Victor Jara" from his "Amigo" album, a song which never fails to remind me of a wonderful girl I knew in college, who had exactly the sort of social passion Arlo sings about so well here. I could see somebody writing a song like this about her one day. Hopefully with a happier ending, and without the electroshock or bone smashing:

 

Politicker.com, an online political news network which operates seventeen political news sites across the country, has announced that it is has changed managed hosting providers, leaving Amazon EC2 for Voxel.

 

Voxel sells managed hosting and content delivery network services. It provides managed hosting and content delivery network services for other political leftist sites such as Daily Kos, Air America and Observer.com.

 

According to the Politickerians the problem was "primarily due to unanticipated scalability difficulties" with the popular cloud offering. Politicker officials said they "made a full transition" of all their sites to Voxel just five days ahead of the November 4 elections, and reported "100 percent uptime and few difficulties," handling the spikes in site traffic one would expect for a political site during an election.

 

Company officials said that after experiencing scalability and clustering issues on Amazon's EC2 cloud offering between June and late October, Politicker contacted Voxel on Oct. 30: "Within hours, Voxel had Politicker up and running on its Managed Hosting platform and VoxCAST CDN and saw immediate improvement in stability and uptime."

 

Before the switch Politicker used Amazon EC2 coupled with Varnish, an open source HTTP caching product and Pound, an open source software load balancer.

 

"While we were working with Amazon EC2 in the weeks leading up to Election Day, we experienced unacceptable stability issues with our software load balancer and realized we were also paying more than we expected. We knew traffic would increase considerably on November 4 and couldn't take any chances." said Austin Smith, Observer Media Group's Director of Software Development.

 

Founded in 1999, privately-held Voxel Dot Net is headquartered in New York City.

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Officials of Soffront Software, a mid-market CRM vendor, have announced that Religare Enterprises Limited chose Soffront CRM to "capture and maintain master data for their entire organization." Religare sells financial services in India to retail, institutional and wealth clients.

"Because we provide multiple types of financial services from many different locations, duplicate and inconsistent data was becoming a challenge," said Gaurav Kohli, AVP Enterprise Solutions at Religare. "We needed a single database that was also flexible, adaptable, easy to use, and accessible to all employees."

 

Religare selected Soffront CRM because of its flexibility, Web availability and system controls, according to the Soffrontians, who said a primary consideration for their software is the audit features, since "any change can always be tracked."

 

Soffront CRM also allows Religare to build screens, workflow, reports or business rules. Coding skills are not needed, Soffront officials say, adding that the tool is good for building products in a reduced time frame.

 

In business since 1992, privately-held Soffront offers on-demand, on-site, or host-to-purchase options, and concentrates on marketing to mid-size companies. Its installed base includes Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized businesses, federal, state, and local governments.

...

 

Servoy, a platform provider for what company officials say are "sexy SaaS solutions," has introduced Servoy 4.1 featuring a single code base development and deployment for desktop and Web applications.

 

The release is an update to Servoy 4.0, an Eclipse plug-in. The product's designed to let developers produce enterprise-level applications using a standards-based Integrated Development Environment, including building iPhone applications.

 

"If a business application is for a specific type of user using only one type of device in areas where networks aren't available, it isn't an Anywhere Web application -- and therefore it should be a native mobile implementation," concluded Yankee Group Research in its "Building the Anywhere Web" publication of May 2008

 

Bob Cusick, President, Servoy USA, said the product's development and deployment environment lets ISVs and companies build "sexy SaaS business applications" deployed to the desktop, browser or the Internet "with a single code base."

 

The vendor counts Symantec, Stanford University, Wells Fargo, Verizon and UCLA hospital as customers.

 

Red Herring has noted that the Dutch-based Servoy's products "have been used to create everything from CRM applications to managing a medical practice."

 

One of the featured enhancements in the update is the ability to create any object at runtime, "allowing SaaS providers to generate user interfaces that are specific for a user or a group of users," according to the Servoyants. "This information can also be stored as metadata, offering the user continual access to customized screens in the future."

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E-mail products provider Message Systems has announced that Infusionsoft, a vendor of marketing automation software for small businesses, selected its Delivery Manager message management platform.

 

Marc Chesley, vice president of Development for Infusionsoft, said the suite of products offered by Message Systems "will enhance our ability to provide e-mail deliverability to our customers, and help us to integrate the use of e-mail with our SaaS application."

 

Infusionsoft sells marketing automation software for small businesses with anywhere from two to 25 employees, and was ranked the 10th fastest growing among software companies on the 2008 Inc. 500 list. In 2007, Infusionsoft officials say, they processed "over $250 million in eCommerce sales and delivered nearly a half billion e-mail messages for its e-mail marketing customers within a 91 to 99 percent deliverability rate."

 

"We found that keeping a high deliverability rate required more and more effort," said Ryan Peterson, e-mail systems manager for Infusionsoft. "We were spending far too much time trying to make our software perform outside parameters that we felt comfortable with."

 

While Infusionsoft's open source mail server was scaling well with its increasing volumes of mail, Peterson says, it lacked the capabilities that Infusionsoft needed to keep its mail flowing smoothly. The IT department responded by writing an application that would segment mail and pool IP addresses, but it proved to be maintenance-intensive and it did not scale to the complexity of Infusionsoft's sending demands.

 

The privately-held company, based in Gilbert, Arizona, is funded by Mohr Davidow Ventures.

...

 

Zoho has announced Zoho CloudSQL, described by company officials as "a middleware service that uses the familiar Structured Query Language to connect business data stored in Zoho with traditional, on-premises applications as well as other SaaS offerings."
 

Zoho Reports, the company's online reporting and business intelligence service previously known as Zoho DB & Reports, is the first to support Zoho CloudSQL. The service added an HTTP-based API that lets users interact with their data programmatically.

 

"Programmatically," you ask? Programmatically accessing data in the cloud is not new, but most services require developers to learn yet another language or access method to be able to interact with it. "SQL is a useful, powerful and widely used language -- there's no need to reinvent the wheel," said Rodrigo Vaca, director of marketing at Zoho.

 

Vaca said customers can use this new technology to "blend the data and applications they have on site with the data and applications they have in the cloud."

 

The middleware technology lets Zoho users store and interact with business data stored in the cloud via SQL. "While Zoho Reports is the first service to adopt Zoho CloudSQL," according to the Zohians, "other Zoho services, including Zoho CRM, are planning to adopt the technology in the near future."

 

Basically the argument here is that Zoho CloudSQL makes it easier for customers to access their data in the cloud because it uses skills that most business application developers already have. In addition, Zoho CloudSQL supports all major SQL dialects, including ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Informix database dialects.

 

Zoho also provides a Java Database Connectivity driver for Zoho CloudSQL, and company officials promise that an Open Database Connectivity driver will also be available shortly.

 

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