Overview
Zimki (initially developed under the name "libapi" — liberation API, from 2005) was one of the first public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, built by Fotango under Simon Wardley's leadership. It had a beta launch in March 2006 and a public launch at EuroOSCON later that year. Zimki was a JavaScript-based platform that allowed developers to create entire applications (client and server side) in a hosted environment — a concept that would later become standard through services like Heroku, Google App Engine, and AWS Lambda.
Context
Wardley developed Zimki based on his mapping analysis of the computing industry, which showed infrastructure evolving from product toward commodity/utility. He anticipated the shift that Amazon Web Services would popularize (AWS launched its core services in 2006 as well) and attempted to position Fotango at the leading edge of that shift.
Outcome
Zimki demonstrated the technical viability of utility computing but was shut down on Christmas Eve 2007, after Canon's board blocked Wardley's plan to open-source it under GPL v3 and Wardley resigned on stage at OSCON in July 2007. The platform never achieved the scale or visibility of AWS, which launched in the same period and benefited from Amazon's existing infrastructure and market position.
Significance
The Zimki launch is significant for the Wardley narrative in two ways: it validated Wardley's evolutionary analysis (the shift to utility computing did happen, at roughly the time and in roughly the direction his maps predicted), and it illustrated the limits of strategic insight without institutional support (correct analysis could not overcome organizational inertia in the parent company).