Every six months we take a look how veteran software and services microcap, EDP, is faring, as much for the nostalgia kick as anything else. Well, not surprisingly the half-time score is not great – just under level pegging on the top line at £2.75m, but with only £134k of operating profit (H1 10: £209k).
But what I did find interesting was chairman Michael Heller’s comment that EDP “remain(s) unique amongst our competitors in being able to offer our own in-house hosting facility.” EDP now gets over one-third of its revenues from hosting its software.
EDP is certainly not the only software player to host its own products (though perhaps it is in its own niche). But there are arguments for and against the ‘DIY’ approach. Intuitively, you’d think ‘why carry the cost and pain of running your own data centre when you could use someone else’s?’ (which, by the way, is one of our alternative definitions for cloud computing).
Well, I wrote yesterday about the problems that CRM SaaS start-up Capsule had, and they are hosted ‘in the Cloud’ by Amazon (see The perils of being a SaaS start-up). We got a comment back very promptly from John Cheney, CEO of (assumed) competitor, Workbooks.com (see the post and click on the comment link) who makes the case for ‘DIY’ hosting. This may be a case of ‘horses for courses’ but I will admit that it is not yet clear to me which is the right horse for the right course. It’s something we hope to be doing much more research on in coming months.