I guess I’ll have to call it SLCaaS - the Software Life Cycle as a Service - because that’s how I think of it. I’m referring to the fairly radical idea that Bungee Labs is pushing - although they prefer to call it a Platform as a Service (don’t go to bungee.com to find it, by the way, that site really is about jumping off bridges with elastic ropes round your ankles).

What do Bungee Labs mean?

First of all, what Bungee Labs is suggesting is that you use their platform, BungeeConnect, to build applications, especially applications that connect to the Internet and look at the world through web-service-tinted-glasses. Bungee demoed the platform for me and, to be honest it looked exactly like a development environment for building apps and connecting to components. It uses a language that look very C-like to me. It also embodies Internet APIs from Google, Amazon, Yahoo, PayPal and UncleTomCobley.com, as indicated in the following diagram:

bungeediag.gif

The web apps that you can build with it are cross platform running on Windows, Mac, Linux and in all the common browsers and they can access all the usual databases. Nowadays development environments are like amoebas, they all look alike to me and they all seem to work in a similar fashion, but BungeeConnect is startlingly different in several ways.

  1. First of all it lives in the cloud, although you can link it into other development environments (Eclipse right now, .Net coming soon) and, if you ask nicely, you can host it yourself.
  2. It is full life cycle in that it embodies testing and deployment.
  3. It’s a team environment built for team collaboration.
  4. It includes application instrumentation which is useful beyond testing, for checking run-time performance.
  5. It’s built for the Enterprise, so attention has been given to scalability and security.

That on its own would be interesting enough to provoke some interest, but even more interesting imho is the pricing model. This is the first software product/service I’ve yet come across that is genuinely pricing itself like a utility.

Here’s the idea:

  • You don’t pay for development at all no matter how many hours you spend in the cloud developing mash-ups or application or whatever.
  • You pay when you put an application into production. The charge is $0.06 per user session per hour.

As you have no reasonable metric to compare it with, $0.06 you probably have no idea whether $0.06 per user session per hour is expensive, so let me “Do the math for you.” At that price, if a user uses applications built with BungeeConnect for 6 hours per day, for the 20 business days of the month, the costs is still only $7.20 per month. Bungee Labs claims that this is about 10% of the price of SalesForce.com - although that’s a little Apples v Oranges. If you use BungeeConnect, most likely you’ll use it to integrate with other applications in the cloud.