Today we are announcing Private Assembla - your own Assembla server.  You can find out more about the packaging on the spiffy new Web site at private.assembla.com.

You can get Private Assembla in three packages:

• Download - a VMware image, with a 30 day free trial and a perpetual license
  
• Cloud - an Amazon AMI
• Managed - You call, and we set it up and maintain it
  

You also get complete source code, technical support, etc.

Here are some things that I think are interesting about this.

We're doing a simultaneous release of the download and the Amazon image.  We think that distributing software through cloud hosts like Amazon is going to become an important trend.  It certainly makes it easy for you to try the product.  If you have an AWS account, you can fire up an image, run the configuration, which takes about 5 minutes, and pay a few dollars for a few hours of unlimited use.  We're also offering a Managed service that makes it even easier.

The usual enterprise software strategy is to start with an installed product (which costs more - good for revenue) and then package it as an online service/ Software as a Service.  We're going backwards and starting with the online service.  We think this is an important contributor to product quality.  We get a lot of feedback from our Internet users, and we have to make a good product because we have good competitors.  So, the Internet product has to be better than a typical enterprise software product.  Google has been pitching this idea as a reason to buy gmail and Apps for Domains, and I think it's a good argument and a good product strategy.

We are doing a little bit of innovation in licensing, to make things easier for our customers.  The license doesn't contain any restrictions on copying (one of my pet peeves), or code modification, and the software doesn't contain code to force you to enter a license key after 30 days. Instead, we ask you to report the number of active user accounts.  The images come with a script to "phone home" with this information.  If you want to disable this script, just contact and arrange a different reporting mechanism, which might just be a manual report.

We wanted to highlight some of the work that we are doing with enterprise customers, both on methodology to accelerate software development, and on tools.  So, we issued a corporate-style press release, here.

That said, the most popular request is for the 20 user download, for users that want to satisfy with network security requirements. 

I look forward to working with all of you to improve this product.  It's a complex product under a simple shell, with many servers and processes packaged into the virtual machine image.  We have done a lot of work on the installer, and on building the VMware and Amazon images consistently, and we will continue to work on the portal UI, and the  upgrade process and on supporting other cloud hosts.  Our goal is to deliver a product that is easy to set up and use out of the box, but still allows users to get involved with customization if they want.