One of the many challenges faced by anyone implementing Office 2.0 applications or adopting the Software as a Service model is the scalability of the underlying infrastructure. Salesforce.com’s growing pain are closely monitored, but Web 2.0 services such as del.icio.us and Flickr suffered from the same ailments at times. Developing some online application with a clean user interface that will work consistently across multiple web browsers is difficult enough. Add the requirement to make the application scale to millions of users in a matter of months and the task becomes impossible to most. Here comes 3TERA.

I got a demonstration for the 3TERA AppLogic grid operating system this morning, and I must say that I am really impressed. On the back-end, it uses advanced virtualization technologies that allows one to deploy existing applications onto a grid, without having to re-write the application itself. On the front-end, it provides an AJAX-based grid configuration tool that allows developers with limited system administration skills to build in a matter of minutes what would take weeks to put together the traditional way. And here comes the best part: once the application is configured, in can be deployed on a small partition of a single hardware server, then upgraded to a full-fledged grid of hundreds of machines in a few clicks of the mouse. Servers and bandwidth are not owned by 3TERA, but instead are provided by ISPs with excess capacity. Awesome!

The system is currently in beta with a handful of early adopters, and the company is still working the details of its business model. Nevertheless, I can already see why developers of Office 2.0 applications would go for it without much hesitations, especially if they happen to fund their fledgling start-up with their own money. For software vendors like Intalio, 3TERA also provides a way to get into the Software as a Service business without having to build any infrastructure ourselves. If the company was to add some integration with Salesforce.com in order to connect billing, provisioning and customer service, I believe that it could turn into a fantastic partner for most of the small to mid-size enterprise software vendors out there.

3TERA AppLogic currently supports the SpikeSource stack, which is something that we are looking at as well. If anyone is interested to use a best-in-class BPMS offered as a service, please feel free to drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do to raise the level of priority for this project.

Many thanks to Adam for having made the introduction to the 3TERA folks, and congratulations to Vlad and his team for having developed an amazing piece of techonology. I cannot wait to see it come to market.

Last but not least, my friend Howard wrote a great piece on Salesforce.com.