I was just reading a recent interview with Treb Ryan, the chief executive of OpSource by Forbes and I think he makes some interesting points.
His main theme during the interview is that multi-tenant applications and a multi-tenant architecture will become "dominant" and "present a challenge to the relevance and importance of a large amount of open source software". The interview also touches on the point that even when you set out to create a new web application, "[with open source] you are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting". Of course, this isn't just true of applications created with open source platforms.
As many of you know, our vision at Progress for many years has been about simplifying the job of creating the worlds best business applications, and if you've attended any recent OpenEdge presentations, (Exchange Online or Face-2-Face events), you cannot help but notice that the vision has been refined to position 'OpenEdge as the leading SaaS Platform for simplifying service development and delivery in the Cloud..".
One very real way this will be achieved, and that customers & partners of OpenEdge will be better positioned than any other application providers, will be the multi-tenant database capabilities that have been announced for OpenEdge 11. This capability is truly a market differentiator and will remove much of the "heavy lifting" that Treb refers to, let alone the myriad of other features planned for OpenEdge 11.
By the way, if you've not seen a recent OpenEdge roadmap presentation and you're in Sweden or Canada, I encourage you to sign up for the remaining Face 2 Face events that are coming to you soon!
Alternatively sign up for Exchange Online 2010 where you're sure to hear a lot more about how OpenEdge is the leading SaaS Platform for application development.