Here are my notes from the second day of SYS-CON’s Cloud Computing Expo (Day 1 notes here):

Day 2 started with a keynote by Amazon’s CTO - Dr. Werner Vogels. Werner is an amazing speaker, and his enthusiasm really gave a kick-start to the whole day. I would summarize his presentation as: “Yep, we invented cloud computing and we own the space.”

Werner talked about the history of Amazon’s Web Services with the basic idea of that being in line with their traditional platform approach they have been using in the commerce for ages, and also with a lot of IP, experience and investment that went into providing these massively scalable services as a cloud platform.

He gave multiple examples of start-ups such as Animoto and Mogulus which would not be possible without Amazon (because of huge upfront capital costs they would have to bare), companies able of cost-effectively accommodating pick demand (Indicars for their 3 races a year), and application vendors using EC2 for their online versions (Mathematica and MathLab) or demo environments (Splunk).

One interesting tidbit was that recently traffic generated by Amazon Web Services got well ahead of the traffic from Amazon’s store properties (including media sold by them online and so on), and the way the former is growing the latter will be virtually unnoticeable on the combined graph very soon.

He also pointed at how they are working on making the services more enterprise-friendly by providing:

• Way to troubleshoot and eliminate failures,
• Control over data/services geographical location,
• Control over performance (with their content delivery platform - Cloudfront),
• Availability (and adapted licensing) of all major OS and database platforms from Red Hat, Sun, Oracle, and Microsoft,
• Ecosystem of ISVs and system integrators (such as Capgemini).
• Efforts to ensure security (one medical app running on Amazon recently got HIPAA certified.)

David Young from Joyent talked about how they are making the cloud more open and user-centric. In the next 18-24 months Joyent plans to move from traditional and rather meaningless for cloud computing Service Level Agreements (SLA) to what he called Application Performance Level Agreement (like: “99% of my customers are getting 3 second responses 99% of the time”).

They are also working on providing frameworks to ensure:

• Automatic scaling of applications they host (today this has to be developed by application creators themselves or they have to lose control and stick to Google App Engine). Basically, new stacks are needed for dynamic scaling, and they will provide something like Google App engine but without Python and Big Table requirements.
• Ability to move between EC2 and other infrastructure providers.

He also mentioned that Twitter has licensed their technology to run the service in their own private cloud.

After that David Bemstein from Cisco gave his pitch of why networks still matter. He started from the premise of their customers keeping asking them about the right network infrastructure for private and public clouds, but then basically switched to Cisco’s efforts in the virtualization space like their Unified Fabric: lossless (datacenter) Ethernet and virtual layer of simulated fiber-channel on top on it.

More or less the only reference to the cloud after that were his words that Amazon does not provide secure network separation, network within Amazon is basically flat and other vendors could use Cisco technology to differentiate.

Serguei Beloussov from Parallels gave an overview of all the markets in which they compete (obviously everyone is familiar with their desktop virtualization for Mac) and also talked about the clouds. Basically they want to be the provider of choice for the automation for clouds: provisioning, workflow, chargeback, delegation to partners and users, and so on.

They are already fairly strong in the service providers space. For private clouds, they think that Microsoft will not be able to kill VMware (”Microsoft is not what it used to be, and VMware is not Netscape”) - so there will be competition which is good for them because they can have the heterogeneous automation game.

When asked about virtual appliances, Serguei basically said that they don’t have resources to be in that market today but they plan to get there within the next couple of years.

Thorsten von Eicken from Rightscale talked about his vision of the way the cloud should be: no upfront costs, automated scaling (so pay for the average use not the peak), easy to use for dev and test (again with automation to give proper environment set up), easy to use for batch jobs - basically cloud computing wrapped into a layer providing full automation for provisioning and scalability.

RightScale provides some level of automation today: they do monitoring and have automated system which can start and stop new instances of your machines in the cloud as required. However, a lot of scalability needs to be baked into the application itself. He gave an example of Animoto which had to scale 10 times in 3.5 days in April 2008 when their widget became popular on Facebook, and how they had to fight various issues (like log files filling up the disks) as they were scaling up the service.

Thorsten also talked about how they want to make it easier to move (or failover) between providers. There can be a lot of small details in each infrastructure making the switch hard like: server persistence mechanisms, IP address mapping, load balancing, disk volume reassignment and so on. And obviously proprietary platform-specific APIs for storage, queuing and so one add to the problem. RightScale does not have a comprehensive solution for that now, but some of the issues can already be addressed by their machine templates.

RightScale already supports Amazon’s EC2, Rackspace, Flexiscale, and GoGrid rigth from their web UI. They are also very agile - for example, they have already added UI for Amazon’s CloudFront released just a few days ago.

Next we had a panel discussion with Geoff Brown, Ken North, Stefanos Damianakis, and Eric Samson.

They were talking on how there are some low hanging fruit which will go to the SaaS/Cloud world first like Email, disaster recovery, log storage, archiving and so on. Obviously Larry Alison saying he is not getting the cloud came up. However, as panelists noted Oracle has had hosted versions of all their products for a long time (and has the offering in Amazon’s EC2 world) so he is probably simply looking for right business models to come.

They also talked on how mobile access can make SaaS model predominant, and in general how parts of systems may or may not be able to move into the cloud.

Finally, we had Javier Soltero who is the CEO at Hyperic fighting the myths of operations-free clouds.

His basic idea was that cloud is just a new platform to run applications. Which means that tools to manage them and provide monitoring, performance management, patch management, backup and recovery, budgeting and so one - are still required. In fact most likely new tools are required because the old ones do not support this new environment.

Folks at Hyperic has adapted their existing (open-source) web apps monitoring solution (HQ 4.0 launched last week) for Amazon: application is packaged as an Amazon machine, they are using Amazon’s storage, and their small agents to be placed on the actual application machines can communicate with the service. They also work in mixed deployments when part of the application is in EC2 and the other half - on premise.

They have also launched an interesting cloud availability service at www.cloudstatus.com to measure performance of various cloud engines. They currently do so by firing up and stopping Amazon machine instances but in the future plan to start collecting anonymous data their agents in customer applications.

This was a busy day! Stay tuned for my Day 3 report coming up next.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Cisco, Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing Expo, Conferences, Hyperic, Joyent, Parallels, RightScale, SaaS, SWSoft
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This week I am at the moderately sunny and warm (can’t believe I was driving through snow storm in Detroit just 3 days ago) San Jose at SYS-CON’s Cloud Computing Expo.

I intent to blog from here all three days - so if you could not make it to the event you can at least get the gist of it from cloudenterprise.info.

The history behind the event is pretty straight-forward. SYS-CON has been holding their International SOA World Conference for ages. As the hype behind SOA started to fade, they did what any company would do: try to diversify. Which led to this 14th SOA World becoming also the 4th International Virtualization Conference, and the 1st Cloud Computing Expo.

There’s still a lot of SOA content - especially in the general sessions - but, hey, we all know that SOA and Cloud Computing are not that far off each other. The difference is that SOA is pushed by consultants who are scaring everyone with talks about how everything needs to be re-architected, and Cloud guys are vendors like Amazon with solutions they want to be relatively easy and ready-to-use right away. And this seems to be making a lot of difference!

Anyways, this conference turned out to be a fairly big event with 3 days packed with more than 90 sessions in 7 tracks.

The conference kicked off with an SOA keynote. David Linthicum (SOA consultant and Infoworld SOA podcast host) tried to downplay the Gartner’s report on SOA disillusionment and link SOA to cloud computing (if you have SOA taking pieces of your application to the cloud is going to be easier), and then went on to some scary architecture diagrams.

After another general session on SOA we could finally get to the cloud tracks. Here are my notes from the sessions I attended.

Stuart Charlton from Elastra suggested his classification of cloud platform architectures and announced their upcoming (later this year) public release of markup languages to describe models and policies for software systems deployed into the cloud. Their goal is to bridge the gap between applications and infrastructure by providing what Stuart called Architecture-Aware Clouds. He also mentioned the upcoming support of Amazon and VMware, as well as their efforts to solve the licensing issues for the platforms used in their systems.

Reuven Cohen - Enomaly - turned his session into an open discussion on the cloud and the hurdles in cloud computing adoption. The issues mentioned included:

• Regulations not allowing data to be hosted outside the country in which a company operates,
• Data and application portability to avoid vendor lock-in,
• Guaranteed data destruction when no longer needed by the client,
• Failovers between datacenters: external belonging to different vendors and internal on client’s premise,
• Existing enterprise apps and how they would need to be re-architected for cloud scalability,
• Certificate not revocation issues (e.g. am employee leaves the company and you need to revoke certificates - with Amazon that would kill your state, Nirvanix seems to allow you to handle that gracefully),
• Amazon entering the content-delivery market (providing local replicas of your media around the globe for low latency access) with very competitive pricing, and Rackspace is partnering with LimeLight networks to also have a solution in the area.

Kevin Haar - Appistry - was talking about how applications are now “all that matters”, and how proper architecture gives you access to any type of cloud: public, virtual private, or private.

Patrick Harr from Nirvanix talked about cloud storage and how it should become more cross-platform/cross-vendor, allowing customers to move data, form cross-vendor failover clusters and so on.

Finally Billy Marshall from rPath - pitched the advantages of using their company’s virtual appliances in cloud computing. Basically, if you create your application machines as rPath appliances you can then save them to the machine format you need: VMware, or Hyper-V, or XEN, or KVM, or Amazon - and deploy anywhere you want. Plus, you get their versioning technology and incredibly small machine size. The biggest drawback is that they don’t provide anything beyond individual machines so if you need failover, load-balancing, queuing service, databases and so on - you are on your own implementing that as individual appliances. It was interesting to see them already having Amazon integration right in their online appliance management UI - with more platforms to be integrated in there next year.

Stay tuned for my Day 2 report tomorrow!

Technorati Tags:
Amazon, Appistry, Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing Expo, Conferences, Elastra, Enomaly, Nirvanix, rPath, SYS-CON
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Microsoft is producing so much effort in the SaaS space recently that they can get one easily confused. Quickly: can you tell the difference between Microsoft Exchange Online, Exchange Labs, Windows Live Hotmail, Microsoft Live@edu, and Exchange Hosted Services?

Fear not. This post will make the distinction crystal clear!

First of all: All of them except Exchange Hosted Services are hosted messaging solutions from Microsoft. Exchange Hosted Services are Microsoft’s anti-virus, anti-spam, archiving solution in the cloud having nothing to do with Exchange. They acquired the services from Frontbridge back in 2005.

By the way, the archiving services are not yet fully integrated with Exchange Online and others (although manual procedures to set the integration up exist), are limited to 10,000 mailboxes per organization, and have performance issues. All of that is to be resolved next year with both software updates and new datacenters getting rolled out.

Now to the actual messaging services…

Windows Live Hotmail (previously known as Hotmail, then MSN Hotmail, then Windows Live Mail, and recently re-branded to the current compromise name) is the only one of them which is not based on Microsoft’s Exchange Server technology. Instead it derives from the webmail system Microsoft acquired back in 1997.

The other difference is that unlike the other three solutions this one is entirely consumer-oriented.

According to Eric Ashby (Microsoft’s program manager in charge of Exchange Online, with whom I talked at TechEd EMEA last week), there are no current plans to move Hotmail to Exchange technology, so both these differences are there to remain for the time being.

Microsoft Live@edu - is Microsoft’s free set of tools and services for educational institutions. Messaging is the key service in the bundle and it comes in 2 options: Hotmail (at which we already looked above) or Exchange Labs (to be discussed below.)

Exchange Online and Exchange Labs are very similar. Both represent hosted Microsoft Exchange Server-based solutions for businesses. The key difference is that Exchange Online is based on the already RTMed Exchange 2007, and Exchange Labs - on the next version (code name “E14″) currently in development.

Here’s a very high level comparison between the two:

Other interesting tidbits of information which Eric shared:

• Currently the Exchange Online service is limited to 25,000 mailboxes per customer.
• He kept using companies migrating from Notes/Domino as deployment examples. Could be related to personal bias or Microsoft’s push for competitive upgrades. He kept recommending Quest Notes migration tools for the task (full disclosure: I work for Quest although not for that team.)
• At Microsoft 500 employees are using Exchange Online. The rest are on regular on-premise Exchange.
• There are a few limitations during the co-existence period when some users are still using on-premise Exchange. The biggest one is unavailability of free/busy information. There are also issues with voice-mail and other services relying on mailbox data. Eric mentioned that there was a yet not-to-be-disclosed vendor working on a mailbox synchronization solution to solve the problem.
• Currently they often recommend dedicated Exchange Online environment for bigger organizations as the only way to have full administrative control of their system. In the Exchange 14 timeframe most of these advantages will go away, so technically everyone will be able to share environment with other customers. Some might still pay extra to feel special and know that they get dedicated service.

I hope this all is making sense now:

• Exchange Hosted Services - is an anti-spam, anti-virus, archiving solution,
• Windows Live Hotmail - is webmail for consumers,
• Microsoft Live@edu - is a bundle for educational institution which may use Hotmail or Exchange Labs as the messaging engine,
• Exchange Online - is hosted Exchange 2007.
• Exchange Labs - is hosted beta of the next version of Exchange (E14) and using all the great federation technologies pitched by Microsoft on the recent PDC event.

Technorati Tags: Exchange Hosted Services, Exchange Online, Hotmail, Labs, Live@edu, Microsoft, SaaS, Windows Live
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Folks at Google have released another set of APIs for Google Apps and like the previous drop in September this one is for administrative tasks.

This is actually a big deal deal because unlike earlier user-oriented APIs these give you programmatic administrative access to all users’ data and settings.

Here’s the key difference in what we had before and what we have now:

• User-level APIs - these are good if you are developing a add-ons/utilities for individual users - like gadgets or Outlook plug-ins.
• Admin-level settings APIs from September drop - awesome for creating custom administrative interfaces.
• Admin interfaces with data access added last week - can enable you to create a lot of really valuable tools: migration, content-management, policies - you name it.

A strong move meaning that the enterprise folks at Google are really starting to think about enabling the ISV ecosystem around their technology. After all, this is what made Microsoft so successful.

Technorati Tags: APIs, Google, Google Apps, SaaS
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Now that we had a few days to look at Microsoft’s Windows Azure it is time to compare it with other alternatives on the market. For our comparison we picked solutions from the biggest players in the market and potential to impact the industry in that area: Microsoft Windows Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, and VMware vCloud.

It is obviously too early to declare a clear winner here. Below is a feature-by-feature comparison table. Here’s a quick summary for each of them.

Microsoft Windows Azure

Currently in early private beta but boasts an impressive set of APIs, great development story, and a promise for good enterprise integration.

Amazon Web Services

The most mature solution on the market and the first one to exit beta. Offers basic cloud infrastructure required (compute power to run virtual machines, storage, communication queues, database) and allows you to fully control your virtual machines and run your LAMP- or Microsoft-stack applications any way you like.

Google App Engine

Boasts the “drop your code and we’ll figure out the rest” approach taking care of all the scalability and infrastructure management for you.

VMware vCloud

A pre-announced solution promising to let you simply take your standard VMware virtual appliances and run them anywhere: on-premise or in a datacenter of any provider supporting VMware’s infrastructure.

Now let’s look at each of them closer and examine them feature by feature:

What’s your take? Did I miss any features or comparison criteria?

Technorati Tags: Amazon, Amazon Web Services, AWS, Cloud Computing, EC2, Google, Google Apps Engine, Microsoft, PDC, vCloud, VMware, Windows Azure
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With all the outages plaguing the SaaS and Cloud Computing vendors recently there seems to be lack of independent rating system telling customers just how reliable each particular cloud service is.

For example, see Richard Watson’s notes from the recent Catalyst event in Prague:

When discussing SaaS, I’d like to see a SaaS suitability rating for each class of applications, like an electrical appliance energy efficiency rating, or credit-worthiness. So maybe we’d give ‘AAA’ to the productivity suites that Guy Creese surveyed yesterday evening and maybe a single ‘A’ rating to CRM.

My guess is that it takes time before such rating emerges (although this might be a chance for someone to just set the standard rating which everyone will start using - like Gartner did with their market quadrants - anyone? Burton group?)

The more practical approach meanwhile is to simply start tracking the outages publicly so needless to say I was pretty excited when I found such a page linked from Kevin Kelly’s blog: Cloud Computing Incidents Database.

This is a wiki page so I highly recommend everyone in the community to start participating and adding information on any incidents: outages, security breaches, and so on - happening in our emerging SaaS/Cloud space. It looks like at the moment the site is still not well attended. The last week’s Gmail outage was not listed - and I added it to the table:

Technorati Tags:
Burton Group, Catalyst, Cloud Computing, community, GMail, incidents, outage, SaaS
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Looks like my recent Google Apps customer base estimates need corrections and the current growth is far smaller than the one we were seeing earlier this year. What’s happening? Are they stuck getting all the technology enthusiasts and visionaries they could get, and having no way of attracting the bigger mainstream market?

Let’s look at the numbers again:

Last week Steve Ballmer quoted some private comScore research stating that Google Apps customer base stopped growing:

“Let’s look at the facts,” Ballmer said. “Nobody uses those things. And the usage data hasn’t grown in seven months. They’re just flat, comScore. Just like this,” he said moving his hands side to side. “It’s just like flat line. Exactly flat line.”

What a chance for Google to surprise the world with new usage data and all they could produce in response was:

…there are now more than 10 million active users (Granted, that’s the same stat Girouard provided in a May blog post).

But Girouard said that with the start of the new school year there had been “fairly huge growth” in the use of Google Docs.

Obviously if they were approaching 15 million or another significant number they would call it out.

To make things even worse they are back to providing confusing information about their enterprise wins. Bloomberg is reporting that this June they one $500,000/year Google Apps contract with Washington, D.C. Hmm… Weren’t they telling CNN recently that this contract was signed last year and for $1.9 million? Both stories quote the same number of user accounts (38,000) so this must be the same deal they are simply reporting as a new one again. Does not help their credibility really…

It really looks like they had been enjoying significant growth up until a few months ago (and were happy to report the numbers and customer names) and then the growth started to slow down leaving Google’s PR confused. Hmm… I sort of heard of such things before. Isn’t this a classical trend from Moore’s chasm diagram:

Basically, Moore argues that the needs and usage patterns of the early technology enthusiasts and visionaries groups are radically different from mainstream users, so once you get the first two groups to adopt your product you get stuck in the chasm not letting you penetrate more lucrative mainstream market.

Is that what we are seeing?

I have a few ideas of the possible reasons here:

Docs and Spreadsheets are too geeky and incomplete: I sort of think that the Gmail part is probably more acceptable to consumers - after all Hotmail, Yahoo mail and others made the concept of web mail widely popular with consumers. But editing documents and spreadsheet in the browser is still way beyond the regular user grasp. Maybe if the browser pretends it is just a local app (like Chrome presumably will be able to do for some sites) and is able to open the document you doubleclick on your desktop - but they are not close to that, and their poor ability to import doc files (I tried to import a simple doc with a clipart picture in it and the import failed altogether) is making the transition from Microsoft Office tough. They tout integration with Gmail, but just try editing the attachment you got in an email and sending it back with your reply - this is not any easier than in Microsoft Office.

Reliability concerns: I would think that Gmail is a far more adoptable concept, the recent outages have probably made a lot of the folks in the enterprise decide to put their evaluations on hold for now.

Poor transition path: Finally, most companies already have some IT infrastructure in place, and if you have more than a couple hundred of mailboxes, and would like to seamlessly go from your Notes or Exchange to Gmail without impacting the email flow and loosing any data - that can be a significant endeavor. For now I am not seeing crowds of system integrators (anyone besides Capgemini?) and ISVs rushing in to solve the problem.

[Update: added this fourth reason]
Sales/Distribution channel: Google’s consumer-oriented “built it and they will come” mentality is not working with enterprises - these guys expect vendors to be building relationships with them - something Microsoft’s direct sales force is doing and Google is not. A good distribution channel (Dell, HP, IBM, etc.) could help but Google does not have that either.

Without these problems addressed, Google might well get stuck with the “more than 10 million active users” for quite some time ahead…

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adoption, Chrome, Enterprise, Google, Google Apps, SaaS
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Bob Ives published an overview of Webex Connect and it looks like SharePoint Online and other soon to be released Microsoft-hosted collaboration tools are going to face pretty tough competition from Cisco.

Feature-to-feature both companies are offering a very similar set of technologies: messaging, presence, document sharing, web meetings. So what’s the difference?

It looks like the companies took vastly different approaches. Microsoft (as it seems - the product has not been released yet) basically took their existing Exchange, SharePoint and LiveMeeting servers, and can now host them for you in their datacenter.

These are more or less the same products you would use today with on-premise deployments, except that instead of your corporate Active Directory identities you would have a set of Live IDs forming your corporate directory in the cloud, which you can set to automatically sync with AD (no password sync though - users need to run a sign-in utility on their computers if they don’t want to type in the credentials manually).

This means that basically, the main value proposition is that you get Microsoft to run the servers for you and save on the administration costs. However, the services are still targeted at the use within your company.

Cisco (which owns Webex) seems to be forming the suite from another side. They took Webex as a foundation and added persistent team collaboration to it. So from what I can say, their suite is going to be more integrated and far better suited to external collaboration.

How easy is it to invite someone not working for your company to your SharePoint? Almost impossible. ADFS was supposed to be the answer but never took off, and your IT has to figure out a way to create and maintain accounts for all external users - which is a huge headache. SharePoint Online does not seem to have any changes to make it work across the enterprise boundaries any better than its on-premise cousin.

By contrast, how easy is it to invite someone external to your Webex meeting? A piece of cake! You just need to type in the email address. From Webex Connect information posted on the Cisco site it seems that this approach will now work for all the other functionality at Webex Connect. Which means that business owners will now be able to easily invite their partners to their project site - isn’t it the way online collaboration should be?

Again, we will obviously have to wait and see what the Microsoft’s final solution will be but from what we know today it looks like Microsoft’s early corporate success and enterprise-oriented identity system is now holding them in the new era of cross-business online collaboration.

You can get a demo of Microsoft’s solution here and on Webex Connect here.

Technorati Tags:
Business Productivity Online Suite, Cisco, Exchange, Identity Management, LiveMeeting, Microsoft, Microsoft Online, SaaS, SharePoint, Team Collaboration, Webex, Webex Connect
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Google Apps (including GMail) were out (again) for commercial customers this week. Considering the August outages not that long ago, this can be a significant PR blow for Google’s enterprise efforts. Or this could be a great opportunity for 3rd-parties to get in and make Google Apps enterprise-ready.

Here’s a quick summary from Slashdot:

“A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored. At about 5 p.m. US Eastern on Wednesday, Google announced that the company was aware of the problem preventing Gmail users from logging into their accounts and that it expected to fix it by 9 p.m. on Thursday. Google offered no explanation of the problem or why it would take it so long to solve the problem, a ‘502′ error when trying to access Gmail. Google said the bug is affecting ‘a small number of users,’ but that is little comfort for Google Apps administrators. Admin Bill W. posted a desperate message on the forum Thursday morning, saying his company’s CEO is steaming about being locked out of his e-mail account since around 4 p.m. on Wednesday. It’s not the first Gmail outage.”

The discussion mostly revolves around half of readers saying that on-premise systems are even more susceptible to failures, and another half (proud IT people) saying that their systems are never down and they can do their jobs better than any folks at Googleplex. No surprise.

However, this comment caught my attention (I am leaving everything as it is in the original post):

“The problem is not downtime- it’s lack of any way to mitigate the problems, and a complete and total lack of any customer service from Google. There is NOBODY you can call when there’s a problem. PERIOD.

Compare and contrast. Google:

• If Google hoses someone’s account, they’re completely fucked. Google will shrug and say “meh, whaddya gonna do?”, and point to their user agreement.
• If someone breaks into their account or changes the password, they’re completely fucked. Google won’t block access, can’t prove who is who, getting logs will be a slow fight to the death, etc.
• If the user deletes a bunch of mail (or someone else does) or there’s a bug with their email client (ie if they’re using IMAP or POP access), they’re completely fucked. Google won’t do a restore. Their backups (if they even have any) are for “oh shit” system-wide fuckups (like, I’m guessing, the current one- I bet the accounts got deleted and they’re restoring from backups.)”

If you carefully read between the lines you will see that these are valid concerns and they are not something you could not fix technologically. Will it be too long before we get applications providing such fault-tolerance and administrative control for Google Apps (and competing platforms)?

• Archiving/backup/recovery outside Google (on-premise or in a competing cloud),
• Dial-tone availability to maintain email flaw and possibly some (most recent?) data,
• Access auditing,
• Offline access (probably will be provided by Google Gears eventually).

The list could go on and on. Sounds like the more outages Google has the bigger is the potential demand for external safety bags other vendors could provide…

Tags: business opportunities, Enterprise, GMail, Google, Google Apps, Google Gears, offline, outage, SaaS
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As Microsoft is ramping up its cloud story it seems that Live Mesh is starting to be positioned as one of the key elements. For example, now the Mesh framework got renamed to just Live Framework - quite a promotion unless there’s something else added in there.

I am quite skeptical about the technology and here’s why:

So the Live Mesh project has two components: an application for file (and other data in the future) synchronization and a set of APIs other developers can use. Let’s have a look at both of them.

The Live Mesh application (as I mentioned in my other blog, and as Joel also noticed) is just another version of Groove. Groove was a team collaboration product with brilliant underlying synchronization architecture which allowed aid agencies to effectively communicate in regions like Africa or Afghanistan. However, it never really got into mainstream.

We recently discussed the reasons why with Ilia from SharePoint-Recovery.com and came to the conclusion that for mainstream users it makes much more sense to exchange emails for ad-hoc communications and connect to SharePoint sites for project-related stuff than to set up Groove and communicate within the Groove spaces. Is Live Mesh much different from that? Not really. It has a web UI so you can access the data without installing the client - but does that make it radically different? Is it again falling somewhere in-between email/file uploading site and real team portals? If that will be the case I am not sure this second attempt will be any better than the first one (i.e. Groove).

Live Framework about which we will soon learn more is presumably the underlying APIs for data synchronization across devices and with some offline capabilities. Is that a big deal? Offline is a big deal but not for data only - people want to have the whole web applications offline and Google’s Gears or Adobe’s AIR seem to be addressing the need in a much more comprehensive manner.

I can sort of see how I could use generic data synchronization in my applications but from what I have heard so far (PDC might change it all) it seems to have too many limitations: client download is required (and I have not heard of redistributable version or in-browser implementation) and Live ID needs to be used to authenticate (if that’s the case the system will never take off outside Microsoft - just imagine Google requiring gmail account to access a mesh-up with Google Maps - there would have been 0 of them on the net.)

Will Live Framework repeat the fate of another cool technology which never found a valid application - WinFS?

Microsoft obviously has much more cloud-related stuff which they will start sharing even more in a few weeks. But so far they seem to be producing a lot of isolated over-engineered solutions which do not make up a convincing story. Let’s see if in a few weeks we will have a completely new perspective on their efforts.

Tags: Adobe AIR, APIs, Cloud Computing, Google Gears, Groove, Live, Live Framework, Live Mesh, Microsoft, PDC
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