How RIAs Curb Costs in an Economic Downturn

On the heels of my last post, I do believe one of the reasons why RIAs are recession-proof is because the solutions enable a reduction in cost with added benefit in optimizing web-related business. Of course my response is again somewhat colored by what my company provides specifically in terms of application intelligence (yes that does equate to how your web visitors negotiate your website), but even more where do you need to optimize for maximum throughput. In the end though, it does boil down to User Experience and Developer Productivity; our tools enable reduction in overall development cost, increased development velocity, reduction in time to market and increased profits. To dicuss these benefits further, please call +1.888.MYWEBORB option 1.

New Products and Pricing Coming November 1st

Hi All:

This post is to give our community advance notice of some changes we are making at Midnight Coders. As of November 1^st, we will restructure our current offering and introduce some new products and services with new pricing. We believe this will help us better meet the needs of our customers, while continuing to develop and offer great Rich Internet Application products and services.

Customers that bought under the current plan will have certain renewal rights and should discuss these rights with me. Certainly, there will be lots of questions around whether or not we will continue to offer free licenses and what the new offering will mean to current and future customers. The answer is “yes”, we will continue to offer free licenses and we will be releasing more information as we finalize the new offering and pricing. Click http://www.themidnightcoders.com/licensing/newlicensingfaq.htm to read our FAQ on these changes.

Mark Piller to visit Denver RIA Developers’ Group

Denver RIA Developers’ Group Meeting

When	5:30pm – 8pm Tuesday, June 3 2008
Where	900 Auraria Parkway, Denver, CO (Tivoli Building – Room TBD) Map

Mark Piller
Founder Midnight Coders, Creator of WebORB, will be sharing with the Denver RIA Developers’ Group on how to use WebORB, the free client-service integration platform, for RIAs.

Agenda:

5:30 – 5:59 Networking

6:00 – 7:29 Main Topic and Discussion

7:30 – 8:00 Open Discussions

We’ve Changed Our Business Model

We’ve been listening to our customers and watching general market trends and as a result, we have changed our business model. In the past we have derived our revenue and sustained continuous development through the sales of WebORB licenses, support, training and professional services.

For many, the price tag on software licenses was enough to cause customers to delay development or search for open source alternatives. We’ve adjusted by making our WebORB licenses completely FREE. This means developers can download the full-featured unrestricted version of each WebORB edition from our website without needing a license key or activation code. We believe this will make it very easy for developers to standardize on WebORB for all their RIA projects no matter the size of the organization.

Additionally, developers who consider and try open source integration tools tend to want some level of support for them and/or for their customers. Open source solutions tend to rely on the community for that, whereas commercial solutions have dedicated support staff and support plans. Midnight Coders is a commercial company located in Frisco, Texas. We provide generally closed but FREE (WebORB for PHP and Ruby are open source) integration software and a suite of four commercial support plans to choose from.

We also provide Quick Start Training and Professional Services/Team Augmentation and are actively developing the final releases of each product edition, as well as, a product for Silverlight and a business intelligence solution. Contact me directly if you’d like to know more.

Ruby on Rails Roast or Toast?

I’d like to find out just how much interest there is from the developer community to advance the Ruby on Rails language and framework. As you know, we offer an open source version of WebORB for Ruby and are committed to advancing our solution for this user group. But….I have prospects who are on the fence about Ruby on Rails. They want to know if they should commit to developing their own time and effort toward creating applications in this environment and if so, what justification is there to support it? I’ve been trying to find justification and see mixed reviews. I’d like to see if we can prove justification…

This brings me to this idea…is there enough interest in the developer community to warrant some sort of developer challenge? I’m a marketing geek and would like to get developer feedback on 1) your interest in Ruby, 2) your interest in developer challenges and 3) how would you like to be rewarded for your efforts if you win?

Please pass this blog on and let’s see what kind of additional buzz we can create for Ruby.

Why WebORB is the Best Choice

We get many application companies with requests to integrate our software with their software. Beyond some of the more obvious reasons to choose WebORB, including performance, ease of use, support, and ROI, application developers have the highest level of flexibility and ability to serve their own diverse customer markets. What does this mean? Well, in my mind if an application developer wants to be able to distribute their application to the widest audience possible and code as little as possible, they need an integration layer that supports multiple server environments. WebORB is the only solution in the marketplace that provides that capability. WebORB provides integration of AJAX, Flash and Flex remoting clients to .NET, Java, PHP and Ruby on Rails. Therefore, developers creating applications in Flex, for instance, aren’t limited to only customers with Java environments; they can distribute their applications to customers who have three other server environments as well.