Coghead, a Web-based business application development platform, on Monday introduced the 2.0 version of its service and announced that Coghead 2.0 now runs atop Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Because it's delivering its software through Amazon.com's servers, Coghead now looks far more credible to developers who might otherwise have questioned the startup's longevity, particularly as talk of a recession grows more voluble.

"People feel secure that their data and applications are sitting in the right place," CEO Paul McNamara said about his company's move onto Amazon's infrastructure.

Coghead aims to attract the 20 million to 30 million knowledge workers who have some technical proficiency but aren't quite at the level of the 3 million to 4 million professional programmers in the world, said McNamara. This appears to be the same sort of person that Salesforce.com hopes will use its AppExchange custom business application marketplace.

"There are 50 million businesses in the world that don't have a server and never will," said McNamara. "But they can still benefit from custom business applications."

Coghead 2.0 boasts 50 improvements, including the tripling of application speed and assorted interface enhancements.

Some of Coghead's new functionality is the result of Adobe's Flex software. "Beyond performance, Flex gives us great cross-platform support," the company said in a blog post on Monday. "Out of the box we support all common Web browsers: IE, Firefox, Safari, and many more. Flex is also a highly productive development environment. This means that we can deliver features faster in the future. Flex also gives us a really polished and rich UI. Adobe is the master of look and feel, and with Coghead 2.0 you'll immediately notice a difference in the usability of the system."

Coghead also said it plans to make further announcements about offline application support, through Adobe's AIR technology, later this year.

McNamara said Coghead has about 25,000 developers using its system. It launched in April and counts business software maker SAP as one of its investors.