I’ve been advising a couple of technology businesses since I left Yahoo. Both business are at different stages of their trajectory but both have a commitment to the notion of products as platforms.
One of the businesses is not quite ready to announce their product so I won’t talk about them yet, but the one that is fully decloaked is Etelos. These guys provide a very open, flexible and powerful platform for provisioning and developing hosted applications (particularly customer relationship management apps, but extending to all kinds of other apps as well — for example, you could use their stuff as a publishing system as well). Much of their stack is open source, and they are working to provide access to their framework from any language and platform.
Most importantly (and this is the big thing that sets them apart from hosted-only systems such as Salesforce.com), they just provide software licensing and support. They don’t force you to host your code and data on their servers (in fact, they don’t even provide hosting anymore — if you need hosting, you can get it through one of their hosting partners). This gets their customers past the biggest objections of hosted applications — “Can I get access to the data?” “If I use your hosted system, does that mean I’m locked in forever?” and “Is my confidential data secure (even from your own system administrators)?” If you’re hosting the code and the data on your own servers, or at least one that isn’t managed by the platform provider with the goal of locking you in and restricting what you can do, the answers to these questions become much easier.
I have room on my plate for one or two more consulting clients at the moment, so if you have a platform business that could benefit from the expertise of a fairly technical product specialist who has opened platforms at places like eBay and Yahoo, do please get in touch.
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