Bingo. I like the Domino guys but this is a transparent pitch for their particular platform. Last time they called, they weren't able to help with my use case. But my use cases are bizarre. Still, there are others like me. And they won't be well served by trying to shoehorn their work into Domino. Sometimes you end up having to build the platform yourself, because the existing ones can't do it.

Other times a pre-existing solution like Domino may help. I found out about sigOpt yesterday, for example, and balked at the price until I discovered they allow academics to use their platform for free. All of a sudden the hypercube searches I was dreading for tuning regularized tensor factorizations became a nonissue, and it costs me nothing.

If that becomes something that other people want to use (probably so, now that I think about it) I don't see why sigOpt shouldn't make a pile of money off it. And the Domino people have offered their platform free or cheap to our group in the past. It's not because of principles that I turned it down (my only real principle is "don't buy the cow if you get the milk for free"). It just didn't serve our group's needs. But the general principle of a shared, convenient store for data and analyses is a good one.

The other general principle that I tend to emphasize is that you should always see about a free trial beforehand. :-)