A New ISV Business Model

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud continues to impress the people who matter most: software developers (in this instance, an ISV).

Genexus is an innovative software platform that enables non-technical business people to rapidly build out applications–including an online presence. Andres Aguiar, their chief architect, sent me a note yesterday to say “We have GXPortal running in EC2. It took us one day to make it work. The site is running a beta of the next GXPortal version, on Java/MySQL”.

There’s an exciting new business opportunity for ISVs: create software that enables businesses to run in an environment without a dedicated data center! In essence, an environment where you throw your servers away! It’s a bit different than the traditional ASP model that has been around for a while now, in that the customer has total control over (and is responsible for) their own server; however they do get to eliminate all that muck known as the expense and hassle of a physical data center. It’s highly unlikely that any business will be able to operate their own center for less than $0.10 per hour!

— Mike