CHICAGO – October 28th, 2008 – Model Metrics, a leading technology and service provider in the Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service industries, today announced it has raised $2.5 million in Series A financing from private investors…

<Link to full press release>

Hey all, first blog here.  I’m sure my prose will thrill the masses.  What could be more exciting than reading about CRM?  Truly thrilling!!  We’ll try not to make it too dry.  Maybe we’ll throw in some discussion around platforms and CSS and other equally compelling topics.

So let’s see, what’s going on.  One word (or is it two?) Dreamforce!  The center of our little universe.  Been excited for an entire year.  Last year was phenomenal.  We ended up taking home the Appy Award for Breakthrough Application.  John Barnes got to go up on stage and take home the dancing hula girl.  It doesn’t get much better than that… We brought a great crew out there, I think we had about 15 people.  This year I think we have 30 people going.  Pretty crazy.  It’s great for everyone though, the ultimate kool-aid and reward for great work.  And of course fantastic networking with everyone in the eco-system.

So what am I excited about this year?  The Foo Fighters maybe?  Somewhat, although I’m from Seattle and do have some love for Mr. Grohl.  But Dreamforce isn’t about the band.  It’s all the cool companies we meet at our booth and around the conference and having a chance to catch up with customers and all the interesting things people are doing with SFDC that we collaborate on.  And hearing about the roadmap and the cool new stuff of course.  And then the drinks at night and hitting the Red Room around midnight and fighting for a spot at the bar and downing a few cocktails and then heading home around 3 and trying to be awake and good to go for the next morning keynote.  The Monday morning general session is probably the most exciting part.  All the energy in the room.  The big announcements.  Two years ago they announced dependant picklists and got a standing ovation from the crowd!  Now that’s a room that seriously loves their SFDC…

I hope to post some blogs while I’m out there, but may not have time with all the running around.  Here’s some of the stuff I think will be cool:

Monday 9:00 to 11:00 – General Session – The main keynote.  We’ve seen some of the cool new stuff and it is cool new stuff.

Tuesday 3:15 to 4:45 – Keynote – Malcolm Gladwell is speaking, the author of the Tipping Point.  Great book, supposedly he’s a great speaker, haven’t heard him before, but looking forward to it…

Tuesday 5:15 to 6:15 – Extreme UI – Using Adobe AIR and Flex to Make Your Apps *Bling* – The Adobe technology is very slick.  This should be good.

Tuesday 8:00pm to 12:00am – Model Metrics Party at Foley’s – Shameless plug.  Party of the year!  Hope to see you there and have a pint.

Definitely stop by our booth (#625) if you are out at Dreamforce and say hi and check out some of our cool iPhone apps and portal demos.  We would love to see you.  We’re officially launching our new branding and website and logo as well.  Hope you like them.

Amazon has made some interesting announcements lately around their cloud computing environment that you should be paying attention to.  This platform has really come together and is a viable alternative to offerings by other companies.  Let’s break down what Amazon offers:

Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)

• This is essentially “a server in the sky” (or multiple servers).  EC2 is the core of the Amazon offering and would likely be the hub of anything you build on their platform.  The main cost is my machine hour so you are only paying for what you use.  The beauty of this design is that you can scale up and down capacity via web service calls (when your application is busy, or during a holiday season).  The pro and con of EC2 is that it is a Linux server and you can use it for whatever you want to.  It could be a web server, a database server or a custom back-end.  Recently Amazon announced it is now certified to run Oracle and MySQL Enterprise.  This is so affordable you should take a hard look at this approach before commissioning an in-house server.

Simple Storage Service (S3)

• S3 is probably the best known offering of the Amazon platform.  S3 allows you to utilize their storage in a secure and very affordable manner.  Your data is accessible via a wide variety of 3rd party clients, or via a REST or SOAP interface.  Just last week the pricing dropped and gets cheaper as you add more data.

Simple Queue Service (SQS)

• This service is very similar to a MQSeries queue or JMS (VERIFY) and is a great way to send messages in an asynchronous manner with guaranteed delivery between various Amazon components.

Mechanical Turk

• This is probably the least known and least understood of the Amazon offering.  However it is a brilliant idea and I predict it will continue to grow and expand as people start to harness the power of this offering.  We are going to be utilizing it in a big way with our next product.  It allows you access to a virtually unlimited “cloud workforce”.  The basic idea is that there are tasks a human is better suited to perform that a computer cannot do well.  This service allows simple access to this workforce to review pictures for a B2C website (i.e. “Is this shirt green?”), or to perform transcription services.

SimpleDB

• This service provides you with a “database in the sky” and allows for simple entry and query access to this data.  It removes the need to design a schema or optimize the setup and provides very fast and efficient access via a simple SOAP and REST interface.  It will be great once this moves to an open Beta.

These services are starting to mature and come together in a fashion that could be utilized to build in-house applications or commercial products.  The amazing aspect of all of these offerings is the pricing.  Amazon has a calculator that allows you to easily estimate your costs.  Since it is all pay-as-you-go there is little up-front investment and even as your demand grows it remains a very affordable way to get rid of your servers and minimize hosting costs and risk.

Amazon also offers a variety of services aimed at fulfillment, checkout and payment that I will discus in a future post as well as look at options from other companies such as Salesforce.com and Google.  
 

CHICAGO – Model Metrics, a leading Software-as-a-Service consulting firm and longtime salesforce.com consulting partner, has achieved authorized training center (ATC) partner status with salesforce.com and will open five new education and training centers in key markets across the Midwest.

<Link to full press release>