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Backbase Updates

I finally had a phone call with Backbase last Thursday and it turned out pretty interesting. I’ll highlight my questions/comments then below that will be the rep’s response.

  1. What’s up with the price? It is not geared towards the developer community and forces developers to bypass Backbase for web applications.
  2. How does Backbase feel about Microsoft releasing Atlas for free and is it direct competition?
  3. The upstart for learning BXML is horribly rough. The documentation is terribly limited in terms of actual how-to’s and application/code structure.
  4. (Along the lines of price) How can Backbase charge so much when things like Flex and WPF are cheaper and richer?

Reponses:
# We get multiple responses. Some people think it is very reasonable and others think it is entirely too high. Yes, the one’s saying it is reasonable are the larger corporations. We’ve been taking all of this into consideration and will be releasing (unofficial statement here) a version geared towards the developer community, in terms of price.
# We don’t see Atlas as direct competition although we do keep up with what Microsoft is doing with Atlas. Backbase is geared more to web applications where Atlas can be used for smaller one-off Atlas utilities. If you aren’t building a large-scale application Backbase wouldn’t be your choice. Atlas is more fluid in terms of what it can do. It can be used for large-scale apps but would be much more manual work than Backbase.
# I will make note of this.
# Backbase isn’t more expensive than Flex. [I obviously had to break it down to him about Flex 2. He wasn’t fully aware. His arguments weren’t very fruitful here though. He was more-so in verbal shock about Flex 2 being less.]

All-in-all it was a good conversation and he didn’t seem to throw too much fluff my way. He was straight up and really answered the questions direct versus beating around the bush. Backbase is aware of what is going on and seems to want to work more with the community (which would be their biggest up-take, IMO) and will be adjusting some things to better suit developers. On their forum I read a post about Backbase releasing an Express Edition which has a new licensing model. The current Community Edition is HORRIBLY limited in the license. We’ll see how the new license works out.

Posted by John C. Bland II on March 27, 2006 10:09 AM |

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