Parse sounds like it will be another Urban Airship, not Heroku, unless:
- They enormously extend their offering to support development of arbitrary server-side code.
- They figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't introduce inescapable lock-in for application developers.
- They figure out how to differentiate this offering from what similar server-side deployment/platform services already provide (Heroku, EC2, AppEngine, whatever).
That's not to say UA or Parse won't ever see a big exit (in this market, who knows). Rather, I seriously doubt -- in either case -- that the economics are there for more than a profitable "lifestyle business".
(no negativity implied -- I favor lifestyle businesses, but VCs don't).
In regards to your first bullet, one of Parse's competitors, CloudMine, allows developers to write their own server-side JavaScript code that executes within a sandboxed environment: https://cloudmine.me/developer_zone#code/overview
Got your point, but I think Parse.com's goal is to provide a data persistence service for Mobile developers that DON'T want to code anything on the server side. It's a simple persistence service, why would I code anything on Javascript in a third party/hosting or SDK like Cloudmine if I can do the same thing in Heroku or Joyent using the full power of Node.JS? :)
I build a Cloudmine app yesterday at a Hackathon. Setup was very fast and early one we didn't have a need for server-side processing. But then requirements evolved (as they always do) and we found the Javascript hooks very useful.
Speaking as someone who has never used node.js before, it was nice to not have to worry about setup and just start coding.
Urban Airship has something like 55 employees, just acquired SimpleGeo for several million, and just closed a $15m Series C from top VCs. May we all be cursed with such a "lifestyle business."
I'm talking about simple profitability, not whether they've been able (or needed) to raise 20+ M in less than 2 years. I've yet to see it demonstrated that they actually have a business model to sustain their 50+ employees (especially given UA's lack of focus and their returning repeatedly to the VC trough).
Engineer from StackMob here (http://stackmob.com). We agree that the need to extend your API on the server side is a huge part of what we are working to achieve in this space. That is why we have always had our "custom code" offerring, allowing you to extend your API in Scala, Java or Clojure. Our partnership with Heroku has also opened up Rails applications to be extensions to your API as well.
As for lock-in we have always said from the beginning that our customers own their data and can take it with them at any time. I think you may find a recent blog post by our co-founder of interest as well: http://www.stackmob.com/2011/11/why-a-paas-for-mobile-develo...
Ownership of data is just one tiny sliver of vendor lock-in with PaaS. The wider issue is how much "stuff" needs to be reimplemented to move to another platform.
Sometimes that's not so bad - if what you have to reimplement is stuff you'd inevitably have to build yourself if you didn't have the PaaS provider, then you're just deferring the cost of it (potentially "forever"). But often you would make different choices if you did not have the choice of the PaaS.
That is why ideas are many but execution is key to a success of a startup. There are many ways I can see Parse getting to a size that of Heroku.
You may not see the potential and that's because you have no idea of what's coming up and I'm sure the founders at Parse have that piece of information and it's going to be at least a $200M exit if they execute to their vision.
[Edit] Wow. OK, would a downvoter do me the favor of explaining why they find my position so repugnant, rather than just hitting the down arrow (as convenient as that may be?). Maybe I'll learn something.
You may not see the potential and that's because you have no idea of what's coming up and I'm sure the founders at Parse have that piece of information ...
Anyone with sufficient experience in developing large-scale mobile applications should have a pretty good idea of where this can go, and what to expect out of the potential customer base.
We're talking about a very familiar space of developer tooling, not rocket science.
... and it's going to be at least a $200M exit if they execute to their vision.
[Edit] In retrospect, venturing a guess here is too silly to do. $200M seems insanely high, regardless.
- They enormously extend their offering to support development of arbitrary server-side code.
- They figure out how to do this in a way that doesn't introduce inescapable lock-in for application developers.
- They figure out how to differentiate this offering from what similar server-side deployment/platform services already provide (Heroku, EC2, AppEngine, whatever).
That's not to say UA or Parse won't ever see a big exit (in this market, who knows). Rather, I seriously doubt -- in either case -- that the economics are there for more than a profitable "lifestyle business".
(no negativity implied -- I favor lifestyle businesses, but VCs don't).