Cloud Cover

Union Square Ventures (USV), the New York early-stage VC fund that has funded consumer Web plays like del.icio.us, FeedBurner and Twitter has invested $1.5m in 10gen, a cloud computing startup started by DoubleClick veterans and affiliated with Alley Corp, a holding company for New York-based Internet-related ventures. USV partner Albert Wenger explains that 10gen fits with USV’s investment thesis despite not being a consumer or social media play because of its capital efficiency and its potential to change the hosting market.

10gen offers an open source stack consisting of an app server and object database; developers can write apps in server-side Javascript or Ruby (experimental) and host it on their own computing clouds. The company comes up against other startups like Heroku and Engine Yard, as well as stack assembly companies CohesiveFT, Enomaly and to some extent another NYC-based startup Cloudsmith (which leverages the Buckminster project at the Eclipse organization). It is good to see some hard-hitting infrastructure plays from East Coast startups.

It’s also striking that many platform-as-a-service companies deviate from the standard Web server-app server-relational DB trio, of which the LAMP stack is an example. Google App Engine uses BigTable for its storage whereas 10gen wrote its own MongoDB database. Does the advent of the cloud computing era necessarily mean a decommodification of well-understood Web infrastructure software? If so, is this decommodification being driven largely by technical reasons or strategic business reasons?