3 December 2009, Mark Pownall, WA Business News
GoPC heads for the clouds
3 December 2009, Mark Pownall, WA Business News
WHEN Graeme Speak first encountered the term 'cloud computing' it was something of an epiphany.
Since the mid-1990s Mr Speak, bankrolled by his traditional Perth-based technology business Central Data, had been tinkering away with a concept of a virtual computing system for which the user needed nothing more than a screen and an internet connection. He called the business GoPC.
During that period, the Perth-based technology entrepreneur had agonised about whether he was wasting time and money developing something that would never be understood by the market.
Then, in early 2008, the participants at a conference Mr Speak attended in the US started delving into this subject, commandeering the term 'cloud computing' for the notion of stationing systems, software and applications elsewhere.
"We had been doing it for 15 years," he said regarding GoPC, which has been operational for the past five years.
"We are so far ahead of the market it is not funny."
At the time, Mr Speak had already committed to the commercialisation of GoPC, having raised $1 million in late 2007 to fund his move to San Francisco to get close to the networks of Silicon Valley.
He now believes the time has come for GoPC to be taken to the market, seeking between $2 million and $8 million from private investors and venture capital.
Mr Speak believes the key markets will be home offices, SMEs and big users such as education providers who want to take advantage of his system to a full suite of open source-based office applications and a virtual server, housed on a super computer and accessible at high speed for what he says is a fraction of the cost of buying typical hardware and software.
As an example, he said a company with 350 users that recently signed onto his system would pay $2,500 a month, compared to a cost of more than $500,000 expected in the first 12 months.
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San Francisco, 26 October 2009: GoPC.net the world's leading independent provider of Cloud Computing and TurboCASH Accounting, the world's leading Open Source Accounting package for small business have jumped in ahead of industry giants and announced the first entry level Accounting SaaS solution for Cloud computing.
Speak said, “Cloud computing does not just mean 'web applications'. TurboCASH's integration with GoPC.net delivers the full desktop product integrated with other desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org, centralized file storage, backups and security, all delivered via the Internet to almost any connected screen. The GoPC.net supercomputing grid platform is extremely mature, operating live since 2005. It drastically reduces IT spend by eliminating license costs and the need to install or maintain anything on local PC's and Servers. Philip Copeman, project leader of TurboCASH Accounting said, “When we first approached GoPC.net I was not sure if "cloud computing" was simply science fiction. I have never been comfortable with the browser based systems, using AJAX and PHP Scripts. TurboCASH has been looking for an alternative that can offer a rich client interfaces that guides users through complex systems. The results with GoPC.net have been astounding. We have cloud enabled the full desktop version of our product without having to rewrite the whole product into a basic web app." "Our users come from over 80 different tax regimes and use over 25 different languages. We have now tested the system in high bandwidth and low bandwidth countries, all report surprisingly high performance. The TurboCASH Accounting system is unique in that a single release can be configured to handle all markets and all platforms, Windows, XP, Windows Vista, Linux and Apple. Our ability to deploy rapidly is the silver bullet that lets us compete against accounting software companies with thousands of employees. The GoPC.net cloud platform extends this further by making it available to any business, anywhere, independent of their existing PC/Server network. This gives the smallest accountant the ability to compete across International boundaries.” Michael Dexter, Program Director of Linux Fund has watched these developments for some time. "When I first encountered TurboCASH it was almost exclusively a Windows program but had great potential on other platforms thanks to its open source licensing. The WINE Windows compatibility environment then brought TurboCASH to both the Linux and Macintosh platforms, but the addition of an open source virtualization environment turns this open source project making a viable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering. Because the underlying code will remain free and open, this is exactly the kind of win-win commercial opportunities that the open source model can create. |
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