I first came across BungeeLabs at Web 2.0 Expo (April 2007), when I was presenting a re-run of my earlier talks on commoditisation, competitive utility computing markets and SaaS.
After handing over several T-Shirts of pre-shaved Yaks, I had a long discussion with them over why I thought their decision not to open source was a mistake and my company's plan to release an open source federated grid at OSCON'07.
So I was interested to read recently that BungeeLabs have "announced federated hosting to expand adoption of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) among enterprises" which will enable users to "self-designate the hosting location"; that's good news. They've also got round to looking at that open source question again.
BungeeLabs have a chance of creating a small piece of an enormous pie (rather than all of a small one). This opportunity depends upon them moving quickly to open source, encouraging other providers to setup as competitors and hence creating an ecosystem with users choosing and swapping between hosting providers.
If they get such an ecosystem up and running, then once it reaches a certain size of providers and consumers, it will become self sustaining. Huge new opportunities will arise in the management and maintenance of this marketplace. The utility hosting aspect is small fry when compared to the potential exchange, brokerage and futures opportunity.
Technically this is all fairly easy, however, it does take a significant force of will and conviction to make such a move. They have left it late to make such a move and a big player may enter this space before they can get started, I wish them good luck.
Fortune favours the bold, opportunity is fleeting and don't dither!
