We saw one of those signs while out shopping this weekend: “We’ll beat the competitor’s price or its FREE!”. So we enjoyed a good chuckle, because who is going to give anything away for free?  But they got to use the word “FREE”, and I guess that’s all that matters. Along the same vein, today’s spam included one with the subject “Harness the Speed and Security of the Cloud”.   Another chuckle for me…but I don’t think that was the goal of the sender.

The Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing admits that the popularity of the term “can be attributed to its use in marketing”.  We recognize that emphasizing being a “cloud solution” can be marketing hype and so we don’t talk about “the cloud” as often as we talk about our features.

At Spitfire we are all about the functionality of our Spitfire Project Management System. A very significant portion of that functionality was created as a direct result of listening to our users.  We are proud of both that functionality and the technological foundation that has allowed us to build an amazing feature set in our software.  So, we talk about our features.  A lot.

We don’t want to stop focusing on those features–and we promise we never will–but that same technological foundation that supports all those features was also designed to scale really, really well.  Therefore, I’m taking a moment today to emphasize that, yes, of course, the Spitfire Project Management System runs “in the cloud”, and that is equally true whether you think that means Software as a Service (SaaS) or software that scales incredibly well and runs on redundant virtual servers not tied to any local footprint.

To get geeky for a moment: our server software runs on anything from a sales laptop up through dynamically provisioned EC2 servers fronted by load balancer(s), all running within the AWS cloud.  Your deployment can be in-house, SaaS, private cloud, public cloud, AWS, … and yes we’ll help you navigate through the choices and pick the deployment that best fits your needs, especially if you found this paragraph all sorts of confusing.

The “cloud” Wikipedia article carries a warning that “this article may be too technical for most readers to understand”.  But IT and Project managers alike know they want software that is rich and flexible enough to meet their needs today and tomorrow, both in functionality and deployment methodology.

So, I’m thinking our next marketing slogan should be “get the Project Management functionality you need, and we’ll throw in the Cloud for Free!“