DEMO: CloudBasic makes building business cloud applications easy

CloudBasic is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Small and medium-sized companies looking to bring their business operations to the cloud but lacking the technical knowledge or resources to do it themselves may have just found a friend in new startup CloudBasic, which is unveiling a tool to move business operations from local servers to Internet-hosted services today at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley.

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The company claims it can help businesses to build, deploy and customize applications easier and more efficiently than existing cloud-enabled tools.

CloudBasic’s tool, developed using Microsoft’s .Net programming framework, helps companies move key elements of their day-to-day computing, such as Excel spreadsheets, to Windows Azure, Microsoft’s cloud hosting service. The company’s tools target nontechnical users. A tool dubbed CloudBasic AppSheets allows the user to create applications based on existing spreadsheet designs, in addition to mirroring existing references and calculations.

While the company appears to not have much competition in its Microsoft-centric niche, it does have several rivals focusing on Java, a programming framework now controlled by Microsoft rival Oracle. They include VMForce, a joint project from online-software provider Salesforce.com and virtualization software vendor VMware, as well as LongJump, which provides a platform for software-as-a-service offerings.

The Irvine, California-based company, founded in 2008 and privately funded to date, has signed up several customers, including an oil and gas company and manufacturing and logistics operations.

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