Smart SaaS

Company:             Wolf Frameworks

Started:                2006

Located:               Bangalore, India  and Herndon, Virginia

Geography:          Global

Market:                Cloud and Platform-as-a-Service

Products:            Wolf Frameworks PaaS

Key Customers: TRA, GMR, Wipro, Delhi Frieght Carriers, HLB Mann, eCounting, Head Start, Juice Junction, SEDS and eDok

Website:             Wolf Frameworks

Blog:                   Wolf PaaS Blog

Twitter:                @WolfPaaS

Recent News:

ARTIST – Learn2turn builds E-DoK on WOLF PaaS

I asked Sunny Ghosh, WOLF Frameworks, Director and CEO a few questions about his business and his view of the SaaS and PaaS market in 2010.

How did you get started?

We started WOLF in 2006 as a pure play Cloud Computing company about 4 years ago. My partner Ralph Vaz started the company and we have both been in the technology industry for more than 30 years collectively.

We have worked on building many exciting products such as Invensys Skelta, Ebbon-Dacs, DB Query, Digimaker CMS that are widely used in the United States, Europe and Scandinavia.

We have seen technology as a growing burden to a customer’s business. When the technology changes like when COBOL transitions to Pascal, then to .Net, then to the next big technology. But why couldn’t technology be separated from the business because it doesn’t make much sense to tightly render a technology specific assembly for customers, which cannot be changed without technical programming? If you could just keep technology complexity and business requirements separate, then technology could be democratized and be made available to all sizes of companies.

Since the Browser is now the focal point of all modern computing, this means this is the end of the operating system and PC-centric approach to applications. By simplifying technology and making easier to access and less expensive, there is a much larger customer base to build our new business on.

Why do customers buy from WOLF Frameworks?

We have three different types of customers that we sell through our partners:

• SaaS Startup’s who have a great idea and want to build a prototype. This type of customer will be a single user and spend a month to build out their concept.
• Professional Services companies that offers business of services and wants to develop a tool that eliminates services time and to create a new recurring revenue stream.
• Enterprises and ISV’s that are looking to create line-of-business applications, and mashups like GoToMeeting integration with their CRM system or corporate dashboard solutions.

At WOLF we offer a zero code Platform-as-a-Service offering. Since most of our customers and users are business analysts, we needed to make a product that was easy to use. WOLF Frameworks consists of a five layer of architecture including XML integration, billing, presentation, application development and database layers.

WOLF Frameworks offers a variety of capabilities that make it a rapid development environment like the following:

• Templates
• Reports
• API’s
• Multiple devices
• Built in storage
• Business rules and workflow engine
• Access rights
• Support for multiple databases

All of these capabilities allow customers to develop applications 70% faster than traditional approaches at half the cost. Customers have used different types of applications including accounting systems and also electronic patient record system.

We also use open standards like XML, AJAX for inter-operability and portability. WOLF also is based on leading technologies like .Net, MySQL, and SQLServer. Our platform also works with leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and a Canadian provider iWeb.

The WOLF platform can also operate in a hybrid environment that supports both Cloud and on-premise applications. In fact we can take a license of your OnDemand Cloud application into your Private Cloud whenever and since we use a single code base it is possible to sync-up hybrid environments.

One of the major reasons customers like to use our platform is because WOLF Frameworks offers minimal vendor lock-in. Applications developed with WOLF are portable since they built with XML. The data, application design and the hosting providers can be moved, with minimal effort.

What broad trends are you seeing in the SaaS/Cloud markets?

Obviously one major trend is the emergence of the Platform-as-a-Service solutions like WOLF. Our customers are looking for fast, cost-effective ways to develop new Cloud-based solutions to either replace older products or to build out totally new ideas.

There are many different PaaS solutions emerging;

• Application-led solutions from Netsuite and Salesforce;
• Application development-centric solutions like WOLF, Force.com or Intuit’s Quickbase
• Development-centric solutions built on LAMP, Ruby on Rails or Microsoft’s Azure and
• Community-centric platforms like Linkedin and Facebook.

The other trend Private Clouds. Our same customers are looking for ways to extend their existing solutions out to the Cloud but are concerned about security and Private Clouds offer a great alternative to on-premise software. WOLF also offers the ability to develop applications that can run in a hybrid mode, both on-premise or in a Private Cloud as well as out in the Public Cloud. You can also migrate existing web applications into WOLF’s multi-tenant platform rapidly.

What’s your outlook for the balance of 2010?

We are feeling good about our growth and have 10,000 users today and look forward to continuing a solid 2010.