TECHNOLOGY
WordPress Now Offers Website Development
The commercial arm of WordPress announced they were entering the website building business. The announcement was generally not well received by the WordPress web development community. Many softened their response and saw opportunity as more information became available.
WordPress Business
People think of WordPress as the company that develops the open source content management system (CMS) called WordPress. But WordPress is more than the open source development community hosted on WordPress.org.
There is also a for profit site that’s hosted on the WordPress.com domain that offers website hosting and domain name registration, among other related services.
The WordPress.com business is a part of a larger collection of WordPress related businesses that are under the Automattic umbrella.
Sister sites run by Automattic include WooCommerce, Gravatar, Jetpack and Akismet, among other businesses.
Automattic’s slogan is:
“We don’t make software for free, we make it for freedom.”
Built By WordPress
The WordPress ecosystem has thrived because web developers and programmers contributed to building and testing the open source WordPress CMS and in return they have a great software for offering web design services, plugins and themes.
But now the WordPress brand is being used to sell web development, which is a step beyond offering plugins or hosting.
The service is called Built By WordPress.
According to the official web page:
“Whether you need a fast and performant eCommerce store for your products and/or services, a polished website for your professional services firm, or an educational website for your online courses, our experts can build it for you on WordPress.com…”
Website Building Plans
The Built By WordPress site offers three kinds of “website building plans” that are focused on three kinds of sites.
- Online Stores
- Educational Sites
- Professional Services
That covers eCommerce, online courses, educational sites, and professional services websites. That last category, professional services websites may be local brick and mortar sites like a yoga studio or a moving company.
The landing page states that an “engagement manager” is assigned to the website building project that serves as the point person.
The cost of the websites starts at $4,900. But oddly, the offering is offered at a limited capacity.
According to the site:
“Custom websites starting at $4,900, but space is currently limited as we launch this new service.”
Web Development Community Responds
An important issue raised in the community is the perception that the web development community helped create WordPress. For WordPress to turn around and begin competing against them is like using their own work against them.
One person tweeted:
“See Automattic’s business model has changed. Feel for the developers this will affect. While WordPress built wordpress[dot]com platform and manage the project, it is the unpaid dev community that made it and gave it the rep they market and capitalize on.”
See Automattic’s business model has changed. Feel for the developers this will affect. While WordPress built wordpress[dot]com platform and manage the project, it is the unpaid dev community that made it and gave it the rep they market and capitalize on. https://t.co/nLxIysu66E
— Philip Joyner (@filljoyner) January 5, 2021
Someone else compared Automattic and WordPress to Amazon and how Amazon created their own products to compete against the retailers selling on their platform.
This is the open source version of Amazon copying popular products and turning them into “Amazon Basics” to take profits away from vendors. It’s unnecessary, predatory, and unfair business practice. The devil’s advocate advocates for the devil.
— Morten Wears a Mask (@mor10) January 4, 2021
The other issue is the perception that the goodwill of the open source WordPress.org project domain name is exploited by Automattic through the use of the WordPress brand, potentially confusing consumers who might not know that WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org.
Absolutely ridiculous that they do this IMO. If they wanted to it shouldn’t be on https://t.co/XtTfaMjzSO.
No one else can use “WordPress” in a domain.
It’s like “Hey, you all made WordPress popular, now we’re going to steal your customers *evil laugh*.
— Jack Kitterhing (@codemonkey_jack) January 4, 2021
There are two things at play here:
1. The trademark and naming confusion making it hard for non-insiders to understand .com is not the Open Source project.
2. Unfair business advantage thanks to sole exclusive use of said trademark when competing with bazaar vendors.— Morten Wears a Mask (@mor10) January 4, 2021
Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress stated that this product is meant to compete with the companies like Squarespace, where people on the entry level of creating an online business might turn to.
The goal then is to keep new businesses within the WordPress ecosystem as opposed to buying into the Wix and Squarespace markets where there is no market at all for WordPress developers.
I would be extremely surprised if this impacts anyone’s consulting business, if you do have a current or potential client leave for it please let me know — it should be all new-to-WP users who wouldn’t have been successful getting started.
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) January 4, 2021
Others were looking on the bright side of the announcement to see if WordPress.com would open the program up to white label work by trusted agencies. Matt indicated he was open to that.
How does an agency get involved so they can receive referrals from this service? What’s the agency’s cut of the $4,900? Who handles the customer during development and after? What’s included in the package? Why is this something https://t.co/DoK7RXvK3t needs to do?
— Scott Carter (@sc456a) January 5, 2021
It’s unclear if anyone wants this yet, so for this experiment don’t have that yet. If it works then definitely will try to open it up.
— Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) January 5, 2021
The entire community wasn’t against the development. Some commented that this did not represent a head-on competition with the WordPress development community, as it was more about competing against companies like Wix and keeping more of the Internet within the WordPress ecosystem.
Citations
Blog Announcement
Let Our Experts Build Your Dream Website
Official Built By WordPress Page
Built By WordPress
TECHNOLOGY
Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3
AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.
Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:
Next-generation chips
This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.
The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.
As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.
Zero-ETL integrations
AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.
A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.
The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.
Amazon S3 Express One Zone
AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.
Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.
Amazon Q
A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.
Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces
Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).
Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.
The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.
Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.
“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”
Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.
“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”
Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
TECHNOLOGY
Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud
Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.
It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.
MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.
Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says
In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.
With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.
Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.
“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“
MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.
Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.
Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.
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