When I shop at Amazon – I briefly pay attention to the manufacturer’s description of the item that I am interested in. I fast forward to the bottom of the page, and I read the user reviews. While I still use Consumer Reports, CNet, and other independent online sources, I must say that I have never had a bad purchase when a community gives an item a stellar rating.

Coghead is all about the community, and we thought who better to talk about Coghead than a member of our first wave of beta participants. We sat down with Larry Velez, CTO of Sinu , a provider of outsourced IT services for small to medium sized companies, to ask him about his thoughts on Coghead.

Question: Why are you interested in Coghead?

Answer: There is too much of a gap between business minds and developers. The business has the ideas and the developers have the knowledge. There are tools which business users have used for standalone applications, but deployment issues with expensive licensing and infrastructure prevent these solutions from scaling. Coghead unties the hands of the business and improves communication with the developers. The business user can create the application structure and workflow, and the developer can help with some of the more complex features and integration.

Question: Does Coghead live up to your expectations?

Answer: Yes, it does. I was surprised by the flash-only interface – and a bit skeptical at first. But now that I see it in action and I have Flash 9, I like it.

Question: What have you done so far?

Answer: I checked out some of the template apps. I am currently working on an application that emulates an internal tool we built using PHP. The forms are very cool. This is a feature that is currently not easy with other solutions such as JotSpot, DabbleDB or online spreadsheets.

Question: Do you have an app in mind to build?

Answer: We are really excited about the idea of using Coghead as the real “glue” between all of our applications – and to bridge the gap between applications without coding. We have a lot of PHP code that connects applications ranging from SalesForce to a MySQL database. We would like to have a central form, which the business maintains, that can store data and interact with other data sources.

Question: How intuitive is Coghead?

Answer: From a Sinu Subscriber perspective, a product being intuitive is often about the templates. Our subscribers do not want to start from scratch; they need to start with something tangible. We have seen customers that would take a FileMaker starter application, make a couple of customizations, and use the resulting solution for years. Coghead has the same value where the users don’t have to create solutions from scratch, and the templates are simple to customize.

Question: What can be improved?

Answer: Better explanations and visualizations of the terminology used, such as collection. All the startups in this space seem to have their own terms at this point.

Question: What would top your wish list for Coghead?

Answer: Partnerships. I would like to see Coghead pursue relationships with reporting providers such as Jasper.

Larry does not proclaim himself to be a hard core developer, but he is quite familiar with technology. Larry definitely noticed that our message is controversial, but he liked it. Sinu itself has created a revolutionary way of IT outsourcing using a fixed-cost, unlimited-support model, focusing on solutions instead of hardware, and the delivery of true value – Sinu believes the value is in a balance between hosted solutions, managed local appliances and the right incentives to keep it all running smoothly.

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