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Updates

These are the updates occurring as part of market research, providing a single place where we can communicate activity, syndicate to Slack when needed, and allow for subscription via RSS.

News

Looking At Five Proxies

Spending some time looking closer at the proxies being offered by Envoy Proxy, Ngrok, Traefik Labs, Solo kgateway, and Gravitee to understand the basics of what is a proxy, and at what point does it become a gateway.
By Kin Lane (@kinlane) |

This is a first dive into market research around “proxies”. I won’t be looking at all the proxies out there, but taking a sampling of five most relevant proxies to what we are looking to build at Naftiko, and provide a first round of research into what features they offer and what use cases they are targeting.

I limited this work to the following five “proxies”. I put in quotes, because they are much more than that. To do this research I spend time going through the website and documentation of each company and product. I copy and paste any pages I feel are relevant to what we are building, and provides an accurate representation of what is being offered by each company. I then take the content I accumulate and I ask claude for a list of all the features and use cases outlined in the content I provided.

It is hard to separate what is a proxy, what is a reverse proxy, and what is a forward proxy. Then it gets muddy with when a proxy becomes a gateway, let alone what all the types of gateways that are in effect (data, API, event, AI, etc.) I did not do the work to separate these layers of features–I feel this is the next wave of work that has to be done to help us build the Naftiko framework, but also shape the narrative in the ecosystem around what differentiates ourselves from what everyone else is building.

Once I gathered the features and use cases for these “proxies”, I asked Claude to provide me with a comparison of features across all the proxies. Next I think we need to discuss what the first set of features we will be offering, and what label we use to describe that. Then I think we have to begin drawing clear boundaries around what proxies are and what gateways are, and how they work with the Naftiko Fabric, as well as Naftiko Fabric. Let me know if there are more gateways we should, and if there are other areas I should be looking at when evaluating these companies and their offerings as part of market research.

Hello Community

This is the introductory post for the markets research site in the community.
By Kin Lane (@kinlane) |

This is the market research site for Naftiko. We have been gathering data on the space since the summer, but feel it is important to also share this work publicly, so we can link to it in investor, advisor, analyst, and domain expert conversations. There is no secret sauce here, and how we see the market segments we are researching and potentially entering is better served alongside a conversation with the ecosystem about it, opening up the opportunity for anyone to contribute, correct, and help shape as we evolve.

As the Chief Community Officer (CCO) I want all of our work to be rooted in the community, and our market research is no exception. I have worked at a number of places where we would do market research initially, then it would go dormant until we needed it for investor, analyst, or other conversations. At Naftiko, I want to ensure that our market research is living, always in tune with the market in any given quarter, but then regularly being referenced as part of product, go-to-market, or revenue decisions we are making.

The Naftiko market research documentation will continue to evolve with new companies being added regularly, and the market segments shifting and evolving as the Naftiko road map evolves. We won’t be entering into all of the market segments liste, and many of the companies listed will be more partners than competition. This documentation is updated in an ongoign basis, with this updates section providing a regular narrative to the decisions behind why something changed, providing a snapshot of market research, but also the decision records behind each move we make as a company, within the markets we are operating within.

Register MCP Servers

Document some of the leading ways in which MCP servers can be registered and injected into existing workflows.
By Kin Lane (@kinlane) |

To help inform end-to-end implementations for use cases that cover our current pilot customers I wanted to understand how MCP servers can be injected into the existing engineering and business workflows of our customers. These are the current ways in which we can register the MCP servers produced via Naftiko Capabiliites and deployed via Naftiko Engine.

The goal would be to make it as easy as possible to register MCP servers that are generated with these sources, but also likely monitor these registries as part of the Naftiko Fabric, ensuring governance at the discovery layer. For Ford, Cvent, and Chase, this is where MCP servers will be distributed to provide value to end user business and engineering stakeholders involved in delivering Naftiko Capabilities.

Hello World

This is the introductory post for the markets site.
By Kin Lane (@kinlane) |

This is the market research site for Naftiko. We were gathering a lot of data and automating different aspects of the work, so it made sense to document it as YAML. The documentation site allows me to more easily communicate market research to the team, and our board. This site is actively maintained simply by updating the YAML manually or in automated ways using scripts to keep large amounts of data up to date and incorporated into our operations.

I am determined maintain an up to date and search version of the market research we are using to inform the go to market and revenue work, and ultimately the product road map. Eventually it would be nice to make this research publicly available, but for now we can keep it internal, growing, expanding, and representing how Naftiko sees the world. Using Docsy to manage our market data work in a simple way using GitHub and YAML, and publishing using Docsy.