Chances are you've never heard of upstate New York startup Apprenda and their product, SaaSGrid. The company's clients aren't home consumers, they're other IT companies like UVision Consulting and Serenity Software that build large-scale business apps. But a couple of weeks ago, Apprenda landed a $5M investment from New Enterprise Associates, one of the early backers of Salesforce.com, to market and sell SaaSGrid.
NEA's investment got almost no attention in the press or on the Internet. But Apprenda's announcement today of support for Microsoft's Silverlight technology should bring Apprenda lots of customers and validate NEA's investment. Silverlight is Microsoft's answer to Flash. Large-scale application developers building atop Microsoft's .NET platform often use Silverlight to make complicated interfaces that run inside their end users' browsers.
SaaSGrid's Silverlight integration is kind of exciting to .NET and Silverlight developers for two reasons: First, it means a single instance of a SaaSGrid-powered application can serve Silverlight to potentially millions of customers at thousands of separate companies, without leaking their data to each other. This trick, called multitenancy, is how Salesforce.com serves thousands of separate sales teams without going broke buying hardware. Imagine if Salesforce had to add a new server for every new company it signed up. Nope, instead it just punches the new customer's account info into the multitenant Salesforce app, and it makes room as necessary to serve the new customers when they need it.
SaaSGrid likewise lets developers use .NET and Silverlight to create large-scale, Web-hosted apps. They don't have to create their own storefronts, or their own accounting and billing systems, for example, and they don't have to know a whole lot about multitenancy to build it into their application. SaaSGrid handles it for them.
"Silverlight is used in [the business-to-business] world as a front end to back end stuff," Apprenda CEO Sinclair Schuller told me in a phone interview. "But Silverlight, it’s been anchored to the idea that it’s going to run in the browser with no notion of an on-demand backend system. SaasGrid ensures that Silverlight can work with back end services in a multi-tenant on-demand fashion."
Apprenda, founded in 2006, is headquartered in Clifton Park, NY and has about 25 employees. Before the NEA investment, Apprenda operated on around $1 million in seed funding from High Peak Ventures.