Cleverism (formerly Entrepreneurial Insights), founded and run by Anastasia Belyh and Martin Luenendonk from Germany visited KAAZING headquarters in San Jose, California recently to interview John Fallows, KAAZING CTO & Co-Founder.
The interview starts with a brief introduction to John’s background in software: before founding KAAZING, John was one of the architects at Oracle’s Fusion Middleware team, responsible for Web-enabling Oracle’s Enterprise Applications (E-Business Suite).
John goes on to describe how his and his co-founder’s personal brand in the developer community, as Ajax and Comet industry experts, transitioned into a corporate brand. He also touches on fund raising questions, including angel and institutional investors and how the business model affects the valuation of a company. John also talks about verticals that benefit from the KAAZING platform, including financial services, online gaming and betting, and transportation and logistics (tracking).
The discussion moves on to discuss John’s favorite topics:
What does the software do?
We are getting the Web out of the way. We’re making the Web more interactive, more real-time, where high availability disaster recovery and global scalability are not afterthoughts. And we do all this through a simpler architecture.
Then, John talks about global trends that affect Web architectures, including the emergence of connected devices (Internet of Things), the fact that we live in a much more connected world, and how applications are becoming more closely modeled to real-life by reacting to each other and human interaction.
He goes on to say:
There are no rules about what direction the information needs to go in, so the concept of a client and a server is getting blurred. The concept of only getting a response when you make a request is dated. KAAZING introduces scalability by eliminating the application glue code where scalability challenges tend to arise.
[…]
When we build new applications, we need to think about them in a new way … the Web was first created to share research papers among university professors. There were much slower networks back then, and the rate of change of that information was quite slow, compared to today’s standards.
[…]
As you fast forward and continue to try to use the same tool for the job, [it’s clear that] it has very strong strength related to being able to fetch documents and cache them effectively. But it may not be as well suited for these new styles of interaction patterns that we need today.
Watch the interview to hear John talk about competitive advantage, further market development and trends, and to hear him describe what mistakes he has made in the last 3-4 years, and what he has learned from it.
(You can also see the video and a full written transcript at Cleverism.)