The Diversity Blog - SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy » Strategy

Is Google App Engine Silently Gaining Traction?

Krishnan Subramanian — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:48:48 +0000

When Google released its PaaS offering called Google App Engine, it attracted Web 2.0 developers in big numbers but it didn't gain much traction like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft platform. In fact, in May 2010, Network World had an article quoting a Forrester Survey which put the percentage of developers using Google App Engine at a meager 8.2%.

Built for hosting Web applications, App Engine services more than 500,000 daily page views, but App Engine's 8.2 percent usage rate, based on a Forrester Research survey of developers in late 2009, trails far behind Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which has nearly a 41 percent share. Microsoft's newer Windows Azure cloud service edges out App Engine, taking a 10.2 percent share. Forrester surveyed 1,200 developers, but only about 50 of them were actually deploying to the cloud.

The initial traction gained by Google App Engine was with Web 2.0 boys and newbies trying their hand with their projects. There were some serious social apps built on top of GAE but the traction among the developers was very slow as pointed out by the survey. After the initial days, Google announced the support for Java with enterprise developer community in mind. We didn't see any large scale adoption of Google App Engine by Java developers initially. However, two things happened after that which seems to be evoking interest towards Google App Engine among the developers.

Google announced the roadmap for App Engine for enterprises. This was the first step taken by Google targeting the enterprise market. It was followed by a partnership with VMware where they announced support for Spring Java apps on Google App Engine. They touted it as an easy way to build, run, and manage applications for the cloud, and to do so in a way that makes the applications portable across clouds. Using the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite, developers could build Spring applications in a familiar and productive way and have the flexibility to choose to deploy their applications in their current private VMware vSphere environment, in VMware vCloud partner clouds, or directly to Google App Engine.

These two announcements brought in renewed interest among developers and the announcement by Google that they will offer support and strong SLAs were attractive enough for enterprises and developers in smaller organizations to consider Google App Engine as the platform for the deployment of their apps. This trend is now confirmed by a report released by Elance, one of the top talent sourcing company, where they announced that there is a large increase (to be specific 10X increase) in demand for developers developing apps for Google App Engine. With this increase in demand, Google App Engine has even moved past Amazon Web Services as the cloud platform in demand.

The IT category however remains the top performing job category with a 44% increase in provider earnings in Q2 year over year. Fueling this growth are companies embracing cloud computing platforms and mobile devices that need to tap into highly skilled and qualified work teams. After making an entry into the top 50 skills in Q1 2010, Google App Engine, the cloud-based application development platform, showed the single largest increase in demand with over a 10x growth quarter over quarter. With this increase, Google App Engine (#37) moved past Amazon Web Services (#40) as the cloud platform highest in demand in Q2.

With Microsoft pushing hard on Azure, we are in for some good competition. If this trend holds universally, we can see that a trend towards platform services exists moving developers away from the IaaS offerings like EC2 consistent with what I say about the future of platform services. I think the next two years will be interesting to see how the market develops for platform services, in general, and Google App Engine, in particular. What do you think? Will enterprises ever take Google App Engine seriously? With today's vFabric announcement, how serious VMware will be in their support for Google App Engine?

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Cisco Planning To Acquire Skype To Target Consumer Market?

Krishnan Subramanian — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:23:13 +0000

Mike Arrington has made a post talking about a possible acquisition of Skype by Cisco. According to him there are talks to acquire Skype at a price near $5 Billion before they complete the IPO process.

Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process, says one of our more reliable sources. We have not been able to confirm this rumor one way or another via other sources, which isn’t surprising. A company in lock down during the IPO process is usually even more tight lipped than normal.

But if true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for an out of the gate valuation of $5 billion or so, we’ve heard. Presumably Cisco would have to bidding in that range to make it interesting.

This is interesting after the recent announcement by Cisco during Cisco Live that they will soon be releasing a tablet based on Android OS to bring Telepresence to the market.

Today Cisco announced their new tablet strategy bringing telepresence to the reach of Joes and Janes like myself and you. They announced a new Android based device called Cisco Cius which taps into their collaboration architecture (remember, they were talking only collaboration for the past year) with virtual desktop integration to deliver collaboration and communication to everyone from small businesses to enterprises so that their increasingly mobile workforce is empowered. It essentially means that users will have anytime anywhere access to state of the art collaboration and communication tools. Just imagine the impact of such a device on your business or government. If you thought iPad was a killer gadget that revolutionized the world, wait till you have this one on your hands.

After their plan to bring Telepresence to masses, it is not surprising that they want to grab a VOIP provider with a huge following among the masses. If the rumor is true, it is clear that they are serious about making a run in the consumer market.

Also, keep in mind that Google is putting together an all in one solution that includes communication and collaboration aimed towards businesses of all sizes and shapes. If you look at the tools Google is bringing in to their Google Apps Suite, they are aiming towards a suite that will help members of an organization work, communicate and collaborate with just a browser. A tighter integration between their browser based voice and video services with the ability to present from their Google Docs Suite is a good alternative to Cisco's Webex Collaboration Suite. A tool like Skype, widely used in the world of SMB, will come handy for Cisco to target this low end segment.

Well, these are all speculations (and fantasies?) based on an unauthoritative post by Mike Arrington. I guess we need to wait and see what happens before proceeding further with other speculations . Till then, Good Night/Good Week depending on where you are.

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Google Push Notification For iPhone: Does It Matter For iPhone Users?

Krishnan Subramanian — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Google yesterday updated its Google Mobile app by adding push notifications for Gmail and Google Calendar. The idea is to notify the users about new mail or calendar events through push notifications on top of Google Mobile app and when the users click to view them, they will be taken to the web interface of Gmail and Google Calendar.

Why Is Google Doing This?

Google is basically a SaaS provider and they want the entry point to their services through the browsers. Even though I recently ranted about their lack of focus on mobile web strategy, browser is still the most important entry point for them on non-Android platforms and traditional desktops. On the iPhone platform, Google moved ahead of the native mail client support offered by Apple by offering a way to sync iPhone to Google mail, calendar and contacts using the exchange support in the native iPhone mail client. It worked pretty well for most of the Google Apps users and they could seamlessly sync their email, calendar and contacts with native iPhone applications. Ever since their bitter public divorce, Google has been taking the mobile web app route to push some of its services like Google Voice and Google Latitude to iPhone users. With this update of Google Mobile App, Google appears to be trying to make Apple irrelevant on iPhone. They are trying to get Gmail and Google Calendar users stop using the native mail and calendar client and instead use their mobile web app exclusively.

Why This Approach Will Not Work?

Even though there are some passionate users of mobile web apps among the iPhone and iPad users (including Fred Wilson), a significant number of users have their workflow aligned with the native apps, especially the mail and calendar apps. I strongly doubt that Google will be able to wean iPhone users away from the native mail and calendar clients. I am a strong advocate and user of SaaS and I use Google Apps for all my needs. But my workflow on my iPhone and iPad is tightly knit around the native mail and calendar apps. There is no way I am going to move away from these apps and I guess many others have the same thinking too. Also, at least in this version, Google iPhone app supports push notification for only one account. Power users like me have more than one Google Apps account and this app is of no use to us on iOS 4.

So?

In short, this is a futile attempt by Google to get people away from iPhone's native mail and calendar applications. Even though I have strong hopes on HTML5 and a future of mobile web based applications, we cannot completely ignore the fact that native applications still have a strong following, at least on the smartphones. It will be interesting to see Google's strategy with iPhone in the future.

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Acquia Uses Gluster Storage For Drupal Gardens SaaS Offering

Krishnan Subramanian — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Acquia, the company behind commercial Drupal offerings, has selected Gluster open source storage platform for their hosting needs. Gluster storage platform offers an easy way to manage data on commodity servers within a single namespace. This is the kind of storage solutions SaaS startups want to have as they offer good performance at a much lower cost. Being an open source platform is a plus because when a startup trusts their storage needs on a relatively smaller vendor, open source offers the kind of insurance that will ensure business continuity.

The Problem:

After Drupal became wildly successful, the person behind the open source software lured some of the Drupal developers to start a company by name Acquia that offers commercial support for Drupal. As cloud computing gained stream and, in particular, as SaaS became part of organizations workflow, Acquia saw an opportunity to offer Drupal as a SaaS offering. Moreover, Drupal's wild popularity meant that they need a reliable and highly scalable storage platform for all their hosting needs including Drupal Gardens.

Acquia runs their infrastructure on Amazon EC2. They run multiple webservers and they wanted to share the filesystem with all these webservers. Running on Amazon meant that they cannot use a hardware SAN and they are constrained to work with EBS due to issues associated with other networked filesystems. EBS poses an unique problem of its own. It can be attached to only one webserver and not all of Acquia's webservers. Since they were already using EBS, they wanted a solution that could help them connect their storage system to all their webservers running on EC2.

Gluster Solution:

Gluster, the commercial company behind the open source storage platform, talked about how Acquia used their platform to achieve higher levels of reliability and scalability. They took the Gluster platform and ran on top of several EBS blocks. This gave them the necessary high availability ensuring that when any of their updates breaks a server, it doesn't take down the file storage. Prior to adopting Gluster, Acquia considered s3fs, NFS and AFS but they lacked some of the features they wanted like

s3fs offers no locking
NFS goes down even when one of their servers go down
AFS is not highly available to meet their needs

Moreover, they needed a POSIX compliant file system as Drupal expects POSIX support. Gluster platform fits very well with their needs. Moreover, Gluster platform runs on top of commodity servers and, in fact, seamlessly integrates with EC2. The fact that Gluster platform is open source and runs on commodity servers offeres tremendous cost savings for companies of all sizes and shapes while offering the high availability and reliability expected in the modern day IT

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Will Google’s Net Neutrality Stance Affect Its Brand?

Krishnan Subramanian — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 06:09:33 +0000

Yesterday, Google and Verizon announced a joint policy proposal to regulate the internet. In short, they have called on FCC to assume control over the internet and regulate it to keep it "open". Even though I am supportive of any proposal to keep the internet open, this pact between Google and Verizon is not only short sighted but also has the potential to kill innovation. With this pact, Google has lost any credibility to protect net neutrality.

There are many issues associated with this pact as highlighted by Electronic Frontier Foundation in this post. The first, and foremost, is the power it offers FCC in regulating the internet. If FCC is dominated by people sympathetic to certain powerful industries, the consumers will be at risk. If FCC is dominated by people sympathetic to social bigots, it will lead to the curtailment of freedom of expression.

Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will cause more harm than good for the Internet. The worst case scenario would be that, in allowing the FCC to regulate the Internet, we open the door for big business, Hollywood and the indecency police to exert even more influence on the Net than they do now.

Second, and more importantly, the call to exclude wireless from net neutrality regulations is ridiculous. As we move from a wired world to a wireless world, it is more important to keep wireless "clean" than anything else. This proposal is clearly anti-business and self serving.

In my opinion, this shows the true face of Google. When it was a newbie trying to make a mark in the marketplace, it was making right noises like Net Neutrality. It created an impression that they have the same DNA as EFF or ACLU in protecting the rights and freedoms of the users. Once they gained enough marketshare with Android and once they reached a certain point where being chummy with the telecom providers is in their best interests, they showed their real side. They realized that they can make more money with Android if they play by the telecom rules than by fighting them. They realized that they have lots to gain by the mobile market by aligning with the wireless providers and they cannot afford to make the money by antagonizing them. Such "self interests" lead Google towards their partnership with Verizon to create a regulatory system that will help both the parties in the long run while destroying numerous other startups and other technological innovations.

Fortunately, tech media did not get fooled by Google one more time. The majority of the reaction to Google-Verizon announcement was critical and the negative vibe is propagating through the social media sites. Geeks and other tech users, who are usually positive towards Google, are really upset and it is showing up in my twitter stream. There is definitely a backlash brewing and it has a potential to grow bigger making life miserable for Google in the long run. For example, some of the tweets in my Twitter timeline clearly points to how the issue could blow up.

Apple devices off wish list re: iPhone dev policies, now Google mocks net neutr. and I don't love HP/Palm Must I pick lesser of three evils?

Hi @google, I know this won't affect you at all, but I'm switching to Bing and getting off gmail. kthxbai

Google turned evil this week. Or, more accurately, they threw their principles in the trash to make a deal for profits. Sigh.

Google you disappoint me.

I guess these tweets explain what people feel about Google's pact with Verizon. Only the naive will think that this is a passing phase and Google will do just fine. It is important to realize that Google owes much of its success to their "Don't be evil" mantra and any deviation from this mantra will have a negative effect on Google's brand and the trust users place on their brand. This is akin to the backlash some companies get when they unabashedly use open source to just gain the initial marketshare and then move on to a proprietary path to build on top of that initial success. I just hope that Google realizes the faith millions of users have on them to do what is also morally right than what is just right for their business alone. If not, it only takes a nudge to get users shift to Google's competitors. It is worth remembering that the cost of shifting is almost zero in the space where Google is doing business.

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Tapping The Cloud To Tackle Oil Spill

Krishnan Subramanian — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:13:18 +0000

As the workforce becomes more distributed, organizations are faced with daunting tasks with respect to workforce management, security, etc.. Location services and SaaS come very handy for organizational managers to manage their mobile workforce in a centralized way. As more and more organizations of all sizes and shapes start using smartphones, organizations can tap into the inbuilt GPS to enforce accountability in the distributed workforce and making them more efficient.

Xora, a company founded in 1999 and based in Silicon Valley, is using location to offer mobile business applications, specifically mobile workforce management (MWM) applications. Xora applications use the GPS capabilities of employees' wireless phones to streamline the exchange of information between the office and the field. Location, captured through the phones, then sent to the Xora Web application where supervisors can view a timely picture of where employees are and what they are doing. Some of the use cases include

Include real time visibility of workers including historical location data
Remote timesheet management
Optimize service and delivery routes and provide a more accurate ETAs
Integration of such location data with payroll, accounting, etc. to have a more seamless and efficient business process

etc.. SaaS makes the management and analysis of the workforce data more streamlined. Xora has been serving industries ranging from construction to healthcare to transportation to government services.

One of the finest use case for such a system is emergency management. Today, Xora announced that Santa Rosa County Emergency Management Division in Florida has used Xora to track the flow of oil off its coast from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico that began in April. Data captured by emergency teams with the Xora application was used to speed response activities, thus limiting the ability of the oil to drift into local waterways and estuaries.

According to the company

Armed with GPS-enabled Sprint HTV EVO™ 4G mobile phones running Xora, Santa Rosa County emergency management teams on patrol boats scouted for oil. When product was found, team members used the Xora app to take a picture and fill out a form noting what type of oil product was found. The photo was attached to the form, and both were submitted via the Xora app to Santa Rosa County’s Emergency Operation Center.

The Xora app automatically captured the oil’s GPS coordinates, giving the EOC real-time location data and details about the spill. The information was used to make important decisions including how to respond and what resources were needed based on the type of product found. Pictures were easily forwarded to other command areas to dispatch appropriate equipment.

Clearly, Xora's case emphasizes the power of cloud and mobile combination to not only solve the needs of enterprises to manage their increasingly distributed workforce but, also, in helping governments across the world respond better to emergency situations. I would love to hear more about companies tapping into the cloud and mobile to solve such interesting problems. Please get in touch with me if you have an interesting story to tell.

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Are We Nearing The End Of Google Wave?

Krishnan Subramanian — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 21:17:19 +0000

Techcrunch has a post talking about the possible demise of Google Wave, its much hyped real time collaboration platform. Even though it is not completely unexpected, it is a bit of a shocker for me personally.

Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.

As Mike Arrington points out Google Wave is definitely a platform too ahead of its time. While many in the West Coast use cutting edge platforms for collaboration, the real world is slowly waking up to the advantages of Wikis and other collaborative platforms. The concept behind Wave is pretty interesting and has the potential to change the way we work across teams and organizations. It has the potential to increase the team efficiency many-fold, leading to increased productivity.

In fact, I have personally benefitted from Google Wave. I am part of some businesses ventures in other parts of the world and Google Wave is helping me collaborate seamlessly with my team members. In fact, I was very excited when Google integrated Google Wave into Google Apps and two of the companies in India are using Google Wave to not only collaborate among the team members but also with partners and customers. If you ask folks like Chris Brogan, they will vouch for the effectiveness of Google Wave as an asset for any individual or organization. Personally, I am saddened by the news and I hope Google doesn't shut it down completely. This is my second favorite Google app to face this fate. Previously, Google shut down Google Notebook, one of my favorite tool before I embraced Evernote.

The positive side to this news is the fact that Google has released the core code as Open Source. I hope someone will take the core code and build a viable platform on top of it. After all, Open Source is a good SaaS endgame.

Here is Google's official announcement. Bye bye Google Wave.

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Innovating Around Restrictions – PlayOn Story

Krishnan Subramanian — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:28:48 +0000

When talking about the capping of data for iPad by AT&T, I argued that such restrictions presents opportunity for others in the market to innovate

When AT&T unexpectedly announced its plan to kill the unlimited plan with a spin on the savings for most of their data plan users, many in the tech blogosphere were outraged and claimed that it will kill mobile innovation. I think we are not doomed like what some people predict. Yes, I am outraged at AT&Tʼs decision to change the plans one month after iPad 3G was released. Yes, I am outraged that their capped plans will curtail the users from tapping the full potential of the iPad, Yes, I think that Apple should have secured an agreement with AT&T to continue offering this popular unlimited plan. Yes, I think that Apple should reimburse the buyers of iPad 3G some money because most of them bought it because Apple highlighted the availability of unlimited data plan from AT&T. However, I donʼt think it is going to kill mobile innovation in any way.

In my opinion, as long as the dominant market leader doesn't use their monopoly position to kill innovation, every such restriction put forward by proprietary companies are opportunities for others. Many open source companies and projects use these opportunities to innovate against such restrictions but it is not necessarily restricted to them.

I have long argued that mobile web apps are the workarounds to restrictions put forward by mobile OS vendors much like SaaS applications as a workaround for cross platform user experience in the desktop world. In the above post, In that post, I quoted a report by ABI Research regarding the use of mobile web apps as an option to overcome restrictive policies of mobile OS vendors and suggested that mobile web is the way to go forward in the future.

I am glad to see this trend picking up because this not only helps developers to get over the restrictions of mobile OS vendors but it will also help them get over any restrictions imposed by the network operators. As more and more SaaS vendors take this approach to their mobile nirvana, the need to jailbreak phones and entering the application black market will vanish.

Looks like the trend is picking up not only with the SaaS vendors frustrated with the policies of Apple and other mobile OS vendors, many third part developers for platforms like iPhone are also embracing the approach. When Apple rejected the Mac Dashboard like app on the App Store, they came back and reached out to users as a mobile web app called Dashpad. They are not the only ones to take the mobile web app route. According to a report on VentureBeat, PlayOn, a service that allows streaming of web video on devices like XBox, Wii, etc., has developed a web app for iPhone and iPod touch after Apple rejected their app submitted to Apple App Store. They used HTML 5, an open standards based approach to web applications, to develop the web interface that could stream Hulu and Netflix to iPhone and iPod Touch.

PlayOn, the service that allows you to view streaming media from the web and PCs on a variety of devices, is finally headed to the iPhone as of tomorrow. It originally planned to release an iPhone app via the iTunes App Store, but due to approval delays by Apple, PlayOn has instead developed a mobile HTML5-driven web app.

This is the way to go against restrictive policies of software providers and telecoms. Yes, we could take the help of government to break such restrictions but we could also innovate against these restrictions which also helps in a rapid technological innovation. I am looking forward to hear more such success stories against the restrictive policies of vendors.

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Amazon Says Stories About Eli Lilly Are False

Krishnan Subramanian — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:07:02 +0000

Amazon has publicly debunked the story about Eli Lilly moving out of Amazon Web Services. In a Twitter message posted by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Amazon categorically state that Eli Lilly is still their customer.

For those following this anonymous source story this morning: Eli Lilly is still very much a customer and has not dropped their use of AWS

This response from Amazon was prompted by a post earlier by Searchcloudcomputing.com which claimed that Eli Lilly has backed out of AWS because they couldn't get Amazon to indemnify them against network outages, security breaches and other forms of risk inherent in the cloud to Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) poster child Eli Lilly has walked away from the cloud computing service after failing to come to terms over legal indemnification issues.

Sources close to Eli Lilly say the pharmaceutical giant was at its wits end trying to negotiate a contract with AWS that would push some accountability for network outages, security breaches and other forms of risk inherent in the cloud to Amazon Web Services. But these negotiations, sources said, got nowhere.

I would take Amazon at the face value now till Eli Lilly comes out and says otherwise. However, the issues raised by this article are still relevant and worth exploring. If Amazon is not willing to be accountable for issues like network outages, security breaches, etc., it is going to adversely affect the efforts by Amazon to lure enterprise customers into public clouds. I think it is important for Amazon to come out and discuss these issues in a transparent manner.

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To Use Cloud Or Not?

Krishnan Subramanian — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:30:20 +0000

Last week when Twitter announced that they are building a datacenter I wrote a post wondering why companies move out of the cloud as they grow big. Even though I don't have many examples of startups building their own datacenters after growing big, many folks in the startup world told me that they wouldn't mind moving to their own DC if the situation demanded it.

This justification can come from any company moving from the cloud to their own datacenter too. If every successful consumer focussed company is going to demand full control over network and system configuration and they want to be the person defining the SLAs, it is a big trouble for the public clouds. When consumer focussed companies are so obsessed with control and SLAs, there is no way enterprises are going to embrace public clouds anytime soon. Either we need a change in mindset of the companies in both the consumer space and the enterprise space or public cloud providers have to do more to lure them towards clouds.

Recently, Larry Dignan wrote this post on CNET about Autodesk using Amazon EC2 to do heavy simulations in the background for their Inventer 3-D design applications.

Grant Rochelle, director of digital simulation at Autodesk Manufacturing, says these tools will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the background. Engineers and designers are trying to ask key questions about their designs, notably whether they will bend or break and how they behave under certain conditions. “By designing Inventor into the cloud our users can consider many alternatives,” said Rochelle. “These compute simulations have been restricted on the desktop due to the hardware limitations.”

This is an example from the other side of the "cloud situation" I discussed in the previous post. Well established companies from even the desktop era are considering cloud to push some of their workloads. This is the most logical approach and many enterprises are already doing it. Along with test and development, they are also pushing other non-mission critical workloads that are beyond the reach of regulations.

I think cloud computing is at an interesting point where traditionally conservative enterprises are eager to explore but web 2.0 kids want to stay away. It is time we (evangelists, analysts, practitioners, etc.) should come together and think about it. Let us keep out the FUDs, spins and other noise from the discussions and explore why this is the case. What do you think?

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