I wonder how Ultidev products and its HttpVpn concept in particular will be and can possibly be competing with upcoming Microsoft Windows Azure platform (see http://www.microsoft.com/azure/default.mspx)? Microsoft Windows Azure “Cloud OS” promises to provide both powerful and highly scalable hosting environment for Web Applications as well as their service enablement behind the firewalls (meaning developers can easily deploy their applications behind their firewalls and expose applications through Windows Azure external hosting environment without any code changes or opening listening ports in the firewalls, http://www.microsoft.com/azure/servicebus.mspx
). How do you differentiate your products’ offering for those who are looking at either Ultidev or Windows Azure as two alternatives?

Thank you,
Todd

I agree with Todd and quite disappointed with Ultidev response. First of all there is nothing to be “skeptical about “cloud” concept.” It is already out there and widely adopted by the industry . Amazon launched EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google and salesforce.com also have it. Secondly , Microsoft Azure documentation clearly states (and in very simple terms) “The Service Bus [part of Windows Azure] provides the communication infrastructure that protects developers from having to create the complex code necessary to achieve seamless connectivity. It allows you to expose a service to the Internet from behind your firewall or NAT.” Isn’t that what Ultidev is promising to deliver (and still did not)? Not to mention that Azure gives much more than just connectivity. It provides storage, security and identity management in interoperable and standards based way along with the automatic scalability that can hardly be bitten by small service providers.

I do not want to sound too much critical just very curious and cautious.
Sounds like you guys did not look into Windows Azure. You are missing the whole point of its connectivity features. It is exactly opposite to what you are describing. There is no need to do anything about routers and NAT or know anything about them. More over, user web apps deployed behind firewalls are not listening to any ports but instead create outbound socket connection to Azure network that is used to turned requests from internet clients (browsers) through Azure infrastructure. All these technical details are completely hidden from developers and irrelevant to their development process because Azure takes care of them silently. I wonder how HTTPVpn is planned to solve the same problem. I suspect you will have to do the same thing except Microsoft already done it. And to make something like this happen hosting environment requires a lot of network and horse power to keep massive number of open socket connections which Microsoft probably more capable of compare to a small company.

On another argument, Microsoft clearly states that Azure is not necessarily enterprise technology. In fact from technology perspective there is nothing “enterpise-ish” to it. It is meant for any size business including home environments. Technology itself requires no additional knowledge beyond writing traditional asp.net apps. Users pay per traffic, if there is no traffic – there is no cost. Exact numbers are not known so it is hard to compare HTTPVpn offering to Azure from that perspective. One point you are right about, Azure does not have any plans (that I know of) to create any App stores. In my mind this leaves Ultidev with only one distinguished feature, hosting branded social/commercial network of custom apps. This is nice, and I look forward to use it if it picks up enough to help me sell my apps but it has nothing to do with technology. I am personally now looking to use Azure on the technology side and somebody else’s web site(s), possibly even Ultidev (if it turns to be good for that) to sell my apps.

J.Taylor