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We live in an era where we consume computing through API and socialize through mashups. Our wide ranging computing needs from mobile apps to social networks to SaaS, brings API to the forefront of our computing senses. To cater to the needs of this API generation, Santa Clara based Sonoa Systems has already launched a service called Apigee which is still in private beta. Apigee is a freemium, self service, API management tools for Web APIs.

For websites like personal homepage or blogs, we use Google Analytics tool to get information on the website visitors and their activities. However, tools like Google Analytics are not useful with APIs. In this era where we consume everything through API, there is clearly a need for a tool like Apigee. Sonoa is already a leader in the enterprise API analytics marketplace. With Apigee, a robust service built with Sonoa’s expertise, they are positioning themselves to lead in the cloud computing and social computing era. Apigee is well suited to help any provider who exposes their services through APIs. By using the freemium, self service model, they are emulating the strategies predominant in the SaaS marketplace.

Earlier Sonoa went after the Mobile market space with a proxy service called Mobile App Acceleration. This service helped mobile developers speed up their mobile application by several fold. Now, through Apigee, Sonoa is targeting developers who develop apps for social networking platform. Apigee provides insight into the emergence of new application trends, with the most popular applications revolving around location-based functionality, as well as a growing social media mashup trend. Popular examples of applications currently using Apigee include:

• mLocal: Allows users to easily access local online classifieds ads;
• Social Mention: Providing indicators of social sentiment as captured across popular social networking platforms;
• Flickr Photosets: Built using the Flickr and Facebook APIs proxied through Apigee, it’s the fastest and most intuitive Flickr app on Facebook, enabling users to view and share comments.

Their free basic version allows upto 10,000 API requests/hour. Their premium service for higher traffic volumes is less than $100/month. Some of the significant features in the Apigee service are

• API Analytics
• API Protection
• API Control

Today the company announced the addition of some new security features that wil help the service gain further traction. To start with, there is a new revamped web interface. They have also added animated API setup and rate limiting dialogues to speed up the setup process for the users. In addition to these features, they have also added some security features like SSL support for APIs using HTTPS and opening up of prominent APIs including PayPal.

This service completely simplifies how service providers can monitor the traction, user behavior, etc. of their service at a very low cost. This is a great tool for web developers trying to mashup services from many different sources. There is a huge potential for this service in both consumer and enterprise space. As business is picking up in the ecosystems around mobile platforms and social networking platforms, a tool like Apigee could be a real game changer.

Open-Xchange, pushed as an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, is a versatile collaboration tool helping enterprises, academia and government take advantage of their smart collaboration capabilities. In this era where having a good collaboration platform is turning out to be a competitive advantage, Open-Xchange is better positioned in the marketplace due to their open source philosophy.

I am a strong proponent of open source in cloud computing. Open source, along with open architecture, can play a major role in keeping the playing field leveled in the cloud computing marketplace. On the other hand, cloud computing, in general, and SaaS, in particular, can help open source vendors monetize their products. SaaS is turning out to be a great business model for open source vendors.

Open-Xchange realized this potential and started reaching out to SaaS providers with comprehensive solutions developed in partnership with top tier technology partners like Novell, Parallels, Red Hat, and Univention. Their Shared Hosting Edition and Appliance Edition are used by many service providers to offer SaaS solutions to their own customers. Such open source products help many traditional service providers to reposition themselves as SaaS providers due to the following advantages

• Low TCO of open source products helps these service providers offer SaaS offerings within the realm of cloud economics
• The permissive open source licenses gives them an opportunity to add features which help the service providers differentiate themselves from their competition

Recently, Open-Xchange partnered with Bull, the Paris based service provider, to offer Open-Xchange to German customers both as a SaaS version and, also, as a on-premise version. Today, Open-Xchange has announced its partnership with Germany based email security vendor, eleven, to offer spam, malware and anti-virus protection to users of Open-Xchange platform. These partnerships forged by Open-Xchange is going to help their SaaS clients to add value on top of their open-xchange based SaaS offerings in the future. For example, Bull Germany will add SaaS offerings such as anti-spam, anti-virus, backup and revision-secure e-mail archiving soon.

Looking at these developments, we can conclude that SaaS is proliferating into markets around the world due to the repositioning by the traditional IT service providers and telecoms. Open source is making this progression easier. More importantly, SaaS is giving a lease of life to many open source vendors who had difficulty monetizing their products.

Google Gears, a technology developed by Google to offer offline functionality for browser based SaaS applications, is officially dead. Google today announced that they are not developing Google Gears any more because they plan to push this offline functionality into HTML 5.

Once in the early days of SaaS, Google Gears was very attractive to many SaaS vendors. I even argued that it is a lifeline for SaaS. After the initial buzz died down, I was talking to many SaaS vendors and some of them mentioned that even though they don’t see significant use of Gears by their users, it was one of the things users were looking forward while evaluating SaaS applications for adoption. Eventually, the development of Gears slowed down.

In the mean time, Google got busy with developing Chrome browser. In January, they released a version of Chrome that had native support for database API similar to the one had by Gears along with APIs like Local Storage and Web Sockets. In fact, tech blogosphere was buzzing with talk about lack of interest on Google’s side for the development of Gears. Today’s announcement puts an end to any speculation firmly confirming that Google will eventually end support for Gears and focus more on getting the features inside HTML 5. 

Cloud Brokers are service providers who sit between the user and the cloud to offer additional value add on top of the cloud. The research firm Gartner lists

• adding services like security and management on top of the cloud
• aggregating the services of customers over many different cloud platforms
• arbitrage between the cloud services making the marketplace competitive

as three opportunities for Cloud Brokers. One such company is Rightscale, a California based company founded in 2006 and having launched close to 100K servers on the cloud. They are one of the largest Cloud Brokers helping companies of all size and shapes take advantage of the cloud. Rightscale already supports AWS, GoGrid, Flexiscale, Eucalyptus and Rackspace. They also support VMWare’s vCloud and announced plans to support Windows Azure. In my opinion, they are one of the most agile companies out there in the space and you can know this by just listening to their CEO, Michael Crandell, talk. His enthusiasm for Cloud Computing is truly infectious.

Yesterday, they announced Rightscale Social Gaming Edition to support companies building games on top of the social networks like Facebook, Myspace, etc.. Three of the biggest social gaming companies, Zynga, Crowdstar and Playfish, use Rightscale to manage their infrastructure on Amazon EC2. As a result, eight of the 12 most popular games on the Web today, with a total of over 77 million daily active users, run on RightScale, including FarmVille, Café World, Mafia Wars, FishVille, Happy Aquarium, Pet Society, PetVille, and Restaurant City.

Sensing an opportunity, Rightscale tweaked their management platform to support social gaming requirements and have announced the release of Rightscale Social Gaming Edition. This edition provides pre-configured gaming deployments with “Facebook-ready” services and, also, comes bundled with consulting services to help companies deploy and manage on the cloud with ease.

The basic configuration comes with a 6-server infrastructure including load-balancing, application, and database tiers. Once the application is either ported over or developed, it is extremely easy to autoscale and, even, rearchitect the setup for the exploding traffic. Another important addition to this edition is a dashboard that provides critical insight into the cost of each game through powerful real-time metrics. The cost of the basic version of Rightscale Gaming Edition is $3500 that comes bundled with 30,000 server management hours.

This release once again emphasizes how Cloud Brokers can add real value to the users and how important they are to the success of cloud computing. Rightscale, with their agile approach to the cloud business, are positioning themselves for the long grind.

Rackspace, the San Antanio based Cloud Infrastructure provider, announced on tuesday that their profits for the fourth quarter has surged by 32%, increasing from rom $6.8 million to $9 million. Rackspace, which was started in 1998, claims to have 70,000 customers now with over 51,000 cloud computing customers. Even though it is not clear how they arrived at this number, I would assume this includes a large chunk of Mosso customers, many of whom were from their shared hosting category. Even without any breakdown, it is easy to see the success of Rackspace’s cloud division. 

After establishing themselves as a leader of managed hosting with focus on fanatical support, the idea for Mosso was developed by two Rackspace employees inside a Wendy’s restaurant in 2004. They thought about the value of tapping into clustering, load-balancing, and virtualization. In 2005, the company adopted their vision and Mosso was born. In 2008, Rackspace announced the acquisition of Slicehost and Jungledisk software. Eventually, they expanded their product line as CloudSites, CloudServers and CloudFiles and rebranded under the name RackspaceCloud. They forged ahead in the cloud computing marketplace by releasing their API as Open Source and with a release of a marketplace in their ecosystem.

According to San Antonio Express News, the revenue from the RackspaceCloud is going grow further by 2012.

Cloud computing now accounts for roughly 9 percent of the company’s total revenue, but that’s expected to grow to about 14 percent this year, according to Tier 1 Research. By 2012, Tier 1 Research estimates Rackspace’s cloud computing business will generate $272 million in revenue.

This is good news for Rackspace and, definitely, a good news for the cloud providers. As businesses get more comfortable with the idea of cloud computing, we are going to see more and more adoption of public clouds. With Amazon Web Services having huge success, Rackspace and, now, Microsoft are well positioned to challenge Amazon.

Mobile platform is getting hotter and hotter for developers. After iPhone turned the user behavior of mobile devices upside down, a gold rush began for developers. The huge success of iPhone platform has made mobile very attractive for everyone from users to developers to, even, enterprises. The success of Android platform and the excitement created by Windows Mobile 7 have increased the opportunity in the mobile space. From the days of “there’s an app for that” Apple campaign, we have moved to an era of platforms where we can easily claim that “there’s is an app store for that”. Not to be outdone by mobile OS vendors, mobile operators from around the world had joined hands together to help developers create apps for devices on their network. Whether it is the Joint Innovation Lab spearheaded by Verizon, China Mobile, Vodafone and Softbank Mobile or the alliance announced yesterday by around 20 operators including AT&T, Sprint, Deutsche Telekom, Bharti Airtel, etc., these operators are hell bent upon having a thriving app ecosystem on their network. They clearly understand that such an ecosystem is vital for their very existence in the upcoming decade.

Alcatel-Lucent, a leader in mobile networking technologies, is already focusing on an application enablement strategy. They are using their leadership position on these technologies to help mobile network operators and application providers to offer apps without getting bogged down by the high network costs. They were acting as a network integrator to help these providers offer wide ranging applications to customers.

Today Alcatel-Lucent has announced a new developer platform on the cloud with game changing APIs that helps bring together developers, service providers and enterprises to build the applications for the future. Alcatel-Lucent have a clear vision about network being a platform for applications transcending mobile operators, devices and mobile operating systems. To make this vision a reality, they are taking an active role in empowering the developers by setting up a sandbox based on the cloud that offers the necessary tools for developers to build, test, manage and distribute applications across networks, including television, broadband Internet and mobile. With this platform, Alcatel-Lucent is acting as a bridge between service providers, enterprises and third party developers. This cloud based platform with open network based services allows service providers to securely expose their unique network APIs to more and more developers, helping them to take part in the application market gold rush.

Let us take a brief look at what this offers. Since I was out on the weekend, I missed an opportunity to get a briefing from the Alcatel-Lucent folks currently busy in Barcelona. But I managed to dig a little bit into the information that was available to me. Essentially this adds some additional tools, a virtual sandbox and a way to handle the entire application lifecycle to the Alcatel-Lucent Application Exposure Suite they announced late last year. Their API integration and bundling model is designed in such a way that it helps developers to monetize seamlessly like the service providers and enterprises by bundling a revenue sharing approach. This model also offers the developers a smart API bundles for application creation by putting together two or more APIs/web services. The advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require the upfront API feels which was acting as a deterrent for many developers. The fact that this model embraces the Open API philosophy announced by the company earlier, makes it even more attractive for developers.

To support the adoption of the API bundle model, Alcatel-Lucent also unveiled two new developer tools — a virtual sandbox and a dashboard. 

The Virtual Sandbox provides developers with a comprehensive environment in which they can simulate, test and verify new applications across service provider networks for delivery across a wide range of platforms.  Developed through Alcatel-Lucent’s extensive engagement with customers worldwide, the Virtual Sandbox helps provide a scalable and  comprehensive testing ground to accelerate development, distribution and deployment of new services.

The Dashboard offers developers real-time business analysis of application activity, API statistics, costs and the revenue potential of applications.  Using the dashboard, developers can explore the various business model options associated with a given service and make an educated determination about its relative value and revenue potential before committing significant time or expense to creating the application.  It also can be used to track the success metrics of an application over time

Mobile platform is very crucial for the very success of cloud computing. The mobile applications are going to be the biggest driver of cloud adoption. By taking the network as a platform approach, Alacatel-Lucent is positioning itself to be a dominant driver of this shift. It will be interesting to see how all these efforts from companies like Alcatel-Lucent to network operators to OS vendors like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are going to shape up the industry in the coming decade. Pretty exciting times are ahead in the mobile market and, also, in the cloud computing space.

Last week Google released Google Buzz, a social network integrated with Gmail, tapping into the already existing social graph of the users. As expected the tech blogosphere went through wild emotions from overtly positive reaction with amazement to criticisms about their perceived privacy flaws. I was waiting for the hysteria to die down before I offer my thoughts on the product and Google’s strategy.

Google has long been criticized as being clueless on their social strategy. In my opinion, Google is well aware of what it wants to do in the social space and are slowly laying the necessary foundation. Forget Orkut, Google is not even serious about such walled garden type of approach. Google is out to build something grander, mimicking the very nature of the underlying internet platform. Their approach to social is more open and distributed than other major social networking sites. Facebook may have more than 400 million users but it doesn’t mimic the kind of diverse world we live in. An online social network can never mimic our real life social network with a walled garden approach. Period. Let us take a step back and dig a bit deeper on this topic and what Google might be trying to do.

In real life, we socialize in many different environments starting with socializing inside our homes to socializing in coffee shops to socializing in the bars to book clubs to, even, socializing while lying down on the beds of the emergency rooms. We take a compartmentalized approach to our social life. As we move from a more grounded world to the web based world, the various social tools we use on the internet platform must mimic the nature of interactions we have in the real life. In the real life, I go to a local book club to talk about a book of my interest, hit a sports bar with friends to watch Superbowl, etc.. I go to different places for different interests. I meet with different sets of people for each of my interests. I am free to take one of my friends from one group, say book club, to another networking group as I please as long as my friend is ok with it. So, any online social network should allow me to have the same kind of social interaction. In real world, I don’t go to the same club house for all of my social activities. Similarly, my social network on the web should be open and distributed without being held inside the walled gardens of any single social network. Any attempt to shut my social life inside the walled gardens goes against my liberty and I call it the big brother approach.

Having made my thoughts on the nature of online social interactions clear, let us take a look at how Google is approaching the problem. Even though Google went along with Orkut earlier, I always felt that they were not serious about taking it to the next level. Their announcement about OpenSocial gave some hints on their social strategy. Instead of trying to keep users inside their properties, Google is letting them socialize on whatever web app they are comfortable with already while giving them a platform to manage their social graph. Google has also introduced social features into many of their web properties individually. For example, I can socialize with a group of people inside Google Reader and another group inside Picasaweb. In short, Google is letting me socialize in whatever place (app) I want with whoever I want just like I do in the real world. I am not restricted inside Google’s properties alone and I can do this on any third party services supporting OpenSocial. Thus, Google is taking a distributed path to social.

With Google Buzz, they are trying to add a social layer with real time updates inside Gmail. With this move, they are trying to achieve the following

• Bringing real-time social conversation inside the Gmail
• Keep Gmail relevant even even as email fades in this world of tweets and other social networking based messages
• More importantly, prepare Gmail as a dashboard for various distributed social properties

Eventually, Google can tie up all the different services, their own properties and other OpenSocial applications, inside Gmail giving an unified interface for the users. It is important to understand the difference between this approach of Google and the Facebook approach. While Facebook wants all the players to dance on their platform, thereby keeping them inside the walled garden, Google wants to let users dance wherever they want as long as they come back to sleep on Google’s properties. By doing this, Google is letting us have the same kind of social experience as we have in the real life and, at the same time, keep control over our online activities.

Google Buzz is just a beginning and it may not even be their main social strategy. They are taking a distributed approach to social with the hope that one day they can tie it all together without drastically disrupting the user experience. The main advantages in their strategy are the distributed approach to social and the promise to be open (with a huge emphasis on data liberation). Essentially, in my opinion, we haven’t really seen the core of Google’s social strategy yet and, as Google usually does, they are slowly going to make us embrace their tools to manage our online social interactions. As I have told many times, Google’s main goal is to collect all of the world’s information. They don’t want to do it by forcing users to do everything on their properties. They clearly understand that it will not work for a goal like theirs. Instead, they are letting us do whatever we want at whatever place we want and, by keeping a control over our social graph, they are accumulating the wealth of information they set out to collect. In my opinion, this is Google’s strategy and they are executing it very well (whether it is good or bad is entirely a different topic).