Coghead provided a service and sell them through a solution provider program. The company partnered with Amazon.com for hosting on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service. But the issue of lack of standards hurt Coghead's cause, said Paul McNamara, Coghead chairman. "I think some customers raised [the lack of standards] as an issue," wanting to see standards before moving to the cloud, he said.

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Coghead was becoming active in development of standards for XML-based application definitions, he said. Coghead represented applications as XML documents. "We'd like to see standards evolve in terms of how that's done," McNamara said. Coghead's approach was different from other approaches, so "interoperability is currently not there" with other cloud platforms, said McNamara. Thus, applications on the Coghead platform must be re-created to run on another platform. "We're giving them time to take all the data of out of the system," McNamara said.

An analyst concurred that lack of standards presents a problem for platform-focused cloud computing. "There's no portability standards, which locks customers to a given PaaS," said John Rymer, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. The lower-level cloud services offered by Amazon "may turn out to be a standard," according to Rymer. "[Interoperability there] is much better due to REST and to a lesser degree, SOAP."

Coghead had on its Web site from McNamara citing a February 18 shutdown. He blamed the current tough economic conditions as a reason for the sale to SAP and said customers have until April 30 to transition to a new service provider. "SAP did not assume any of Coghead's customer relationships or obligations and, at this point in time, SAP does not have plans to continue offering the Coghead service commercially," McNamara's statement said.