Coghead customers left high and dry despite SAP acquisition

SAP is acquiring the assets of cloud computing start-up Coghead, although the services that Coghead supplies are being terminated in April.

Coghead customers include the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business, insurance company Colonial Group International and Taiwan-based freight forwarding company Morrison Express.

Coghead competitors they can turn to include Caspio, TrackVia and Intuit QuickBase.

The service termination was issued to customers by Coghead before SAP's acquisition of the assets was announced. SAP was already an investor in Coghead, which had been looking for a buyer since the beginning of the year after being hit by the economic downturn.

Coghead provided an online application development platform. The Coghead service currently runs on Amazon Web Services. Coghead allowed customers to develop and host database applications online via a drag-and-drop interface.

SAP has bought Coghead's intellectual property and hired its engineering team. For now, SAP will only use Coghead as an internal tool.

Coghead says customers should stop development on its platform and download their data, as SAP has ceased technical support. They will now have to find another platform as well as having to rewrite their apps.