Google Wave - the future of email, collaboration?

Just seen this preview of Google Wave:



Letting the implications sink in but if Google migrate all of their (commercial and consumer) GMail users onto this platform when it launches next year this could become the new paradigm for enterprise(to-enterprise) collaboration pretty quickly: email, IM, documents and media sharing. As Rod Drury comments: the classic Exchange email model is just broken.

Google are going to open-source the APIs - how many new apps could be built upon the top of this and what new business models could that lead to? (Google exec quote: "...this again is a very early release and at Google we have quite a luxury that in the beginning of the life of a product we focus exclusively on technology and making a product successful....the question of monetising we deal with later"). Yeah right.

(Incidentally one of the jumpouts of the demo was the multilingual collaboration on a document - 4 users editing in English Chinese, Hindi(?) and another asian character set all at the same time! - not sure if this is in Google Docs already, but mindblowing compared to just a few years ago)

Cloud Services in the Enterprise - slides from Canterbury Software Cluster meeting 5 May 2009

I enjoyed giving a talk on "Cloud Services in the Enterprise - Making Sense of XaaS" to Canterbury Software Cluster on Tuesday. Lots of great questions at the end and conversations afterwards - please feel free to carry on the conversation by email or here on the blog.

The slides are here for reference:

Google App Engine supports Java!

In case you missed it Google App Engine now supports Java. See:

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/04/seriously-this-time-new-language-on-app.html

That's likely to drive adoption considerably deeper than support for Python, then.

PS Also in case you missed it see the earlier Google App Engine blog article from April Fools' Day: Google App Engine Supports Fortran. Funny.

Ruby over ABAP - is this SAP's cloud PaaS play?

Something caught my eye the other day which might be nothing, but might be the first inkling of another global PaaS play. This great interview on InfoQ with Juergen Shmerder on Blue Ruby, SAP's implementation of a Ruby VM over their proprietary ABAP stack.

So this is SAP's strategy to drive much broader developer adoption of the ABAP technology in which much of SAP's ERP products are written. (Let's face it they're never going to do it with ABAP by itself! ;-) ) To quote Vishal Sikka, SAP CTO:

"The language Ruby, for example, is thought to have reached a million programmers faster than any other language ever."

Now Blue Ruby itself is still very much still in SAP's laboratory, but when you combine this with SAP's recent acquisition of cloud application platform Coghead's IP assets, and (maybe I'm reading too much into this) you start to see another PaaS play emerging. In the same way that SalesForce have leveraged their leadership position in the CRM space to drive adoption of Force.com and the Apex language, so SAP might play in the ERP space with Ruby:

	Google	SalesForce	Microsoft	Bungee Connect	Heroku	SAP?
Platform	Google App Engine	Force.com	Azure	Bungee Connect	Heroku (Rails over Amazon EC2)	SAP Cloud Platform?
Language	Java and Python	Apex	C#, VB, Python, Ruby	Bungee Logic (proprietary)	Ruby	ABAP and Ruby

Cloud Services Stack - "Above the line"

Well it's been a while since my last post: so happy new year, then. ;-)

(I've been very busy! Among other things adding lots of features to the Memia Cloud Services portfolio management toolset which is currently in development *and* doing a load of business planning around the forthcoming SaaS offering - watch this space...)

Meanwhile, I've recently joined the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) and while browsing through the forum posts I came across one from Kent Langley of nScaled : "Cloud Computing Stack Update". In this post Kent updates his ontology of the Cloud Stack - copied below. This picture gives a nice "ground up" taxonomy view of the Cloud Stack, from "public utilities" (=power companies) upwards.
However, I'm often struck by the subconsious manifestations of the two primary mindsets at work within the "Cloud" space. Generally people seem to either come from an infrastructure background or a software background, but not both. So while this diagram gives plenty of detail describing everything up to and including "operating system" (ie what I would call "Cloud Computing" but not "Cloud Services"), it doesn't place the same emphasis on the variety within the SaaS space. That is, it's an infrastructure-centric view.

Nothing wrong with that, but as someone working in the Cloud space with a primarily *software* hat on, here's an (equally skewed!) ontology which elaborates a more software-centric view of the Cloud - effectively "above the line". Obviously its horses for courses, but in my opinion if we're trying to define the whole Cloud stack from top to bottom then we need to be more granular when describing the common services living within and across the PaaS/SaaS level. (Feedback invited on the contents of the light blue boxes - this is a first cut and I intend to iterate.)

"Services 2.0" - that'll be our Magic Quadrant, then

Last week I read an incisive article on “Services 2.0″ company Appirio by Prashanth Rai on CloudAve:

http://www.cloudave.com/link/services-the-very-critical-part-of-the-on-demand-ecosystem-appirio

There is some pretty visionary content included here with an outline of how the move from on-premise to cloud-based software will affect and remodel the IT services industry, especially those wrapped around implementing and integrating these solutions. This shift to “Services 2.0″ is likely to happen at the same rapid pace as the move to SaaS is happening now - exciting times. Memia is aiming to be prominent in this space, so it's good to finally have a term that Gartner can hang a magic quadrant on. ;-)

Secure "cloud" services offered by retail bank in New Zealand

Check out this advert from ASB bank here in New Zealand (http://www.asb.co.nz) - a bank offering secured data storage in (their own) cloud: this is a great (early) example of how established businesses can leverage their existing internet channels to expand into adjacent offerings using cloud services. In this case ASB is relying upon the Trust relationship they already have with their customers. Interesting...