Creativity abounds in cloud-based apps

When Connected Planet recently asked me to write a two-part series about cloud-based services, the most difficult part was to narrow down the topic. In the end, I focused the first piece on cloud-based unified communications and the second piece on cloud-based security. Both stories focused on specialty service providers (many of them start-ups) that have all taken a bit of a different approach to the market.

Along the way I ran across numerous other service providers with interesting cloud-based business models, and I wanted to take the opportunity here to recognize a few of these:

- FonGenie offers a combination of business intelligence and a virtual telephone system platform to provide retailers and small businesses with a Web interface to manage greetings and menus heard by callers, delivering what the company calls “timely and relevant” daily specials, offers, incentives and discounts. According to the company up to 35% of callers who heard daily specials have accepted an offer, and some client companies have seen average sales increases of 25% or more.

- SensorLogic is in the platform-as-a-service business, offering clients cloud-based software tools for developing asset tracking applications, which the company claims can reduce development time by as much as 90%.

- Veracode offers a cloud-based platform for application risk management. The company verifies the lines of code underlying applications that organizations develop internally, as well as from open-source, outsourced and third-party software sources.

- HyperOffice offers cloud-based collaboration software that has been used in creative ways by small- and medium-sized businesses. A property management company, for example, uses the service to maintain a master shared calendar to track evictions and move-ins. And a financial company has used it to support a group wiki, a la the similarly named online encyclopedia.

The cloud-service market reminds me a lot of the early days of packaged software for personal computers, when a slew of start-up companies developed programs that could handle all sorts of specialized tasks, from creating floor plans to managing a stock portfolio. Many of those companies were eventually acquired by larger players, which merged multiple programs into a comprehensive software suite. Before long I expect we’ll see a similar pattern in the cloud services market.