The SWDN

A major player in the hosting industry reaches out to service providers and software vendors to make it easier to provide applications.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 7, 2006]

Today at ISPCON, Herndon, Va.-based SWSoft is announcing its SWSoft Developer Network (SWDN). The SWDN is designed to make it easier for developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to integrate their products into SWSoft's hosting infrastructure, which includes the Plesk control panel, Virtuozzo virtual server system, and other products, all of which are components of SWSoft's HSPComplete package:

SWDN is an initiative that builds on OPEN FUSION, an SWSoft project to more tightly integrate all the company's offerings.

The company quickly realized that the work it was doing on its own software was similar to the work that, say, a billing provider would need to do to integrate with Plesk or HSPComplete.

"We realized that when a service provider offers an application, they have to integrate that application into their service provision infrastructure," explains Ilya Baimetov, SWSoft director of technology, on the phone from Russia, where the company was founded. "When you go to your control panel, you don't just want to manage the webhosting part (the e-mail, the website, the FTP), you also want to manage billing. But billing may require a separate login. There's often no one control panel to manage an account."

This must change. As offerings become more complex, as hosts strive to offer more, hosts want to offer a single sign on to manage every app.

"We've built a central spot for documentation, a soft of developer portal," explains Doug Johnson, SWSoft product manager, the guy who will be at ISPCON today talking about the announcement.

The portal includes forums and also hosts developer editions of SWSoft software. These developer editions are limited capability versions that can be used to test interoperability. In addition, the website contains all the SWSoft APIs.

The forums have three levels of participation. Anonymous users get access to the forums. Community users provide contact information and can obtain support if they need it while doing development work. Developer level users have access to the developer editions of SWSoft software and also can talk directly to SWSoft's own development team. Initially, Developer level participation is free, but the company plans to charge $295 per year for it after the first year.

So how is this different from the past? "In the past," says Baimetov, "developers had to request APIs and documentation from SWSoft."

It's all part of a three year plan to bring everyone together. The initial push is to integrate infrastructure, supporting basic functions like billing and provisioning. Later stages will integrate more complex applications, starting with, say, photo albums.

SWDN's had a 90 day beta test running through today. At press time, SWSoft already had over 1,000 developers on its network. That's success.

Today is the first day of the rest of SWDN's life. . .

—End