It’s no secret that the iPhone App Store is a walled garden. Mobile platform developers like Apple have several ways to control what can run on their devices: Prohibit plug-ins like Flash, cripple the Java they run, or simply limit the installation process. But HTML 5, the next big standard for the web, will dramatically reduce this control by creating a new generation of web sites that look and feel like they’re iPhone apps.

Limiting what can run on a phone requires some degree of collusion among the device maker (Nokia, HTC), the phone operator (T-Mobile, Canada’s Rogers), and the application store itself. Many other mobile device makers have policies that are similar to, though less obvious than, Apple’s: Android doesn’t support Flash (but it’s coming), for example, and has a special application for YouTube videos; and some carriers block Skype, location functions and streaming TV. The problem becomes much more noticeable when one company, like Apple, is both a platform and a service provider and co-develops features (like Visual Voicemail) with a single carrier.

HTML 5 is poised to change this. It’s rich enough to do all kinds of things within a browser that once required dedicated applications or plug-ins. Available in Firefox 3.5, and soon many other browsers, it allows advanced graphics (to rival Flash), real-time two-way streaming (including binary data) and audio. Every new feature in browsers chips away at the walled nature of the App Store because it makes web sites behave more and more like dedicated iPhone applications.

So when Apple removes an application, the affected company can rebuild on a web site using HTML 5, and deliver similar functionality. Just look at what Google said it would do when Voice was pulled from the App Store. This is one reason why the search giant is a strong proponent of HTML 5: As browsers get more powerful, mobile platform developers lose their stranglehold on the application market.

Apple and others face a difficult choice. They can embrace HTML 5 on mobile browsers, and lose their ability to constrain what applications can do. Or they can cripple their browsers, controlling what runs on their devices but delivering a second-rate surfing experience.

To keep up with the resulting arms race, mobile devices will have to inspect web page content or blacklist specific sites — rather than just blocking a plug-in or removing an app — in order to exclude certain applications. That’s a net neutrality nightmare: If the iPhone blocks voice.google.com, the Federal Trade Commission is sure to come calling. As a result, richer browsers may well tear down the garden walls — and chip at the enviable revenues — of companies like Apple.

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Tags: Android, App Store, Flash, HTML 5, iPhone

When a web application gets popular enough, features matter less and the underlying ecosystem matters more. There’s a tipping point at which network effects outstrip software features. When that happens, users get the benefits of additional functionality — and the risk of new kinds of lock-in. Salesforce.com, for example, started as a replacement for in-house software. Now it’s a software ecosystem complete with a programming language, developer conferences, and a marketplace for third-party developers. That makes Salesforce a lot harder to leave than if it were just a bundle of software features.

Freshbooks, whose SaaS-based billing tool tracks time and expenses and sends invoices to customers via email or post, is at that tipping point. It’s grown to 900,000 subscribers using a mix of free and paid offerings. Now that there are so many users, subscribers often wind up sending bills to one another. So the company made it possible to send those invoices within the system directly, bypassing external email. Today, Freshbooks revealed that 20 percent of its subscribers had adopted this new capability — taking Freshbooks from software tool to SaaS ecosystem.

Is this how freemium pays off? In “Free,” Chris Anderson speculates that information-based businesses won’t make money from what they do, but rather because of what they do. Here, Freshbooks may not make money from every subscriber — but it can offer compelling new features because of them.

Once a SaaS provider hits a certain size, secondary business models based on network and ecosystem effects can eclipse the initial business. This makes the economics of running a SaaS provider a bit strange: Too much focus on short-term revenues may undermine long-term success, because free helps reach critical mass, where new models can emerge. At the same time, network effects may make it hard to launch a new SaaS offering, since early players can erect significant barriers to entry.

For SaaS customers, this portends a new kind of lock-in. SaaS promised us freedom from the proprietary formats and costly, custom deployment efforts of enterprise software, but network effects can constrain subscriber choice and make it hard to leave. If you want access to Salesforce’s ecosystem, you have to use Salesforce.

Freshbooks CEO Mike McDerment, understandably, maintains that network effects are more about added benefits to end users than about lock-in: “If you can add a feature that’s not possible without a network, and there’s sufficient value offered by that network, then it’s worth it to stay on the network.”

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My inbox is broken.

Not in an I-can’t-check-my-messages kind of way, but in a fundamental, inboxes-will-never-be-the-same-again kind of way.

With every birthday reminder, bill confirmation, new friend, direct message, password recovery, and mailing list, the content of our inboxes becomes less and less a means of communication and more and more a record of all we do online. Email is the lowest common denominator of digital identity. It’s our web keychain. It’s the catch-all of our online lives.

But if inboxes don’t fundamentally change in order to adapt to their new role as the keeper of myriad transactions across the entire web, they’ll be obsolete.

Have a look at your inbox. Chances are much of what’s in there isn’t just traditional email conversations between you and someone else. A few hours of unscientific inbox querying and a quick analysis with Mail Trends showed that less than half of my messages in the last month consisted of such simple correspondence. The other half were records of things I’d done, people who’d followed me on social networks, bookings I’d made, confirmations of sites I’d signed up for, and so on.

Companies like Xobni and Xoopit offer email analytics, as do some Firefox plug-ins, but everyone still assumes that what’s in an inbox is predominantly conversations with people. It’s not.

Inboxes need to get smarter. My perfect email client would:

• Scan incoming messages and build a list of all the companies I’ve paid, and those with whom I have recurring payments, showing spending history.
• Keep all my logins and password recoveries for online accounts in one place, safely encrypted.
• Group and track mailing list digests, and give me controls to unsubscribe from them.
• Show me all interactions with each of my friends in one place, regardless of whether they happened on email, Facebook, Friendfeed, or Twitter. OpenID holds promise here, but has yet to be properly integrated into inboxes.
• Track and analyze transactions semantically, from upcoming travel to events I’m attending.

Today, I have to visit dozens of other sites and services to make sense of my online life. This is a waste: I already have a record of all these transactions in my inbox. I just need a better way to look at them.

Gmail offered a tantalizing glimpse of what inboxes could be, but stopped short of recognizing this shift from conversations to a digital record of our online lives. The inbox of the future looks more like logfile analysis and aggregation and less like an email platform. Today, you can hack some of this together with Greasemonkey scripts, clever Gmail filters, or add-ins from Gmail labs. But it’s not enough: We need an inbox that embraces its new role as the universal record of our online lives.

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Back in the desktop software era, magazines ran software reviews in which the side-by-side comparisons of features took up an entire page. Buyers used these reviews to shortlist vendors, trying to anticipate which features they’d need over the next five years. Typically, the software with the most features won. Feature-itis ruled.

No more. With software as a service, the focus has become whether the tool is good enough on day one and how well it will adapt over time. Take, for example, the Family Service Agency of San Francisco, which replaced its ailing paper-based system with SaaS donated by the Salesforce.com Foundation, improving productivity and accountability along the way. Speaking today at the SIIA’s eGov event in Washington, D.C., Bob Bennett, the agency’s CEO, explained how the agency turned a salesforce automation tool into a social services management tool.

The point here is that the initial feature set didn’t matter much. Indeed, in order to evaluate SaaS, those page-long feature comparisons can be whittled down to just seven critical questions:

• Adaptability: How easily can you modify the application? This can be as simple as adding fields or building dashboards, or as advanced as a programming platform.
• Reliability: How much can you depend on the system to function well? This boils down to four things: Performance, availability, scalability and security.
• Task productivity: How effectively can your users accomplish their goals? How many cases-per-minute or entries-per-day can workers do, and how many errors do they make?
• Price: How much will it cost — really? Because SaaS offerings are so varied in pricing, it’s hard to compare them. A better model is to create several benchmark subscribers (a 10-, 100-, and 1,000-person organization) and compare upfront and ongoing costs for them.
• Back-end integration: Can you plug it in to other things? Any enterprise SaaS offering will have to work with other systems, for everything from authentication to data sharing.
• Longevity: How long will the SaaS company be around, and what’s your exit strategy? With ISVs, you could ask for software in escrow. But as the sudden disappearance of Coghead shows, when a SaaS provider closes down, your entire IT systems can vanish with the flick of an “off” switch. Offers from Intuit and others to help stranded customers notwithstanding, this is a big problem.
• Ecosystem: How many third-party developers and integrators surround a particular platform with plug-ins and add-ons, and how active are they? A vibrant ecosystem means a more extensible, flexible solution.

The key point, however, is that features on day one don’t matter as much as the efficiencies and cost savings you can squeeze out of the SaaS tool within 30 days of adoption — and how confident you are that those efficiencies and cost savings will endure.

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Elastra today unveiled an updated cloud strategy that aims to tackle one of the biggest challenges of cloud computing: How to move applications smoothly between in-house infrastructure and clouds like Amazon’s EC2. If the strategy works, it could pave the way for so-called “hybrid clouds,” those that combine on-demand capacity with in-house compliance.

Elastra’s not the only one building a path to hybrid clouds. VMware this week announced a “private cloud” offering at VMWorld Europe that lets applications run both in-house and atop clouds, just as long as those cloud providers also use VMware. Others, like Enomaly, have been tackling the problem as well.

To build a hybrid cloud, you first need to bundle up all of the web servers, databases and configurations that make up the application — what Elastra calls a “deployment.” This deployment is portable, able to run in a cloud or in-house, because it defines not only the components but also how they interact and grow. Then you need to set rules as to where and how that deployment can run according to your specific security, capacity and business requirements. For example, a deployment that deals with credit cards might only be able to run on a PCI-compliant platform.

What’s been missing up until now is a way to fulfill the second part. With the launch of an open beta for the Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server 2.0, IT managers can set policies as to which applications can run where, such as:

• Which capabilities, such as PCI compliance, a cloud must provide in order for a particular deployment to run.
• How big or small the application can be.
• How to marry a component (such as a JBoss server) to the available resources (such as a size of EC2 virtual machine.)
• How to grow the deployment when certain events happen.

Stu Charlton, Elastra’s chief software architect, thinks early adopters of hybrid clouds will be enterprises migrating their applications into the cloud for development, testing, QA, and stress-testing, then bringing them back in-house for production.

In the end, infrastructure-agnostic application deployments like those built on Elastra, VMWares, and Enomaly help sever the umbilical cord that links legacy applications to their underlying infrastructure. With the addition of policy-based management, they become candidates for cloud deployments. Which is very good news for cloud providers.

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When Google first released App Engine as a “Preview Release” last April, developers had relatively little computing power. Only a few apps got Google’s permission to grow beyond the free computing quotas, including BuddyPoke, Lingospot, Mentalfloss and Giftag.com. Now, the company’s going to start charging for its App Engine cloud platform. That’s welcome news for early adopters of the cloud computing platform, because even if they have to pay, they’ll now have access to the company’s vast computing resources.

Since the launch of App Engine, Google’s been collecting feedback from developers. It’s added SSL support, a status dashboard, and a memcache API, and is working on other features, such as a task queue and additional programming languages.

Google’s taken a lot of flak over the question of cloud lock-in, and Pete Koomen, the Product Manager for App Engine, says the company is trying to be as open as possible. “We want to encourage openness,” said Koomen, pointing out that there are no special hooks between App Engine and other Google services. “The more proprietary the APIs, the easier it is for developers to lock themselves in,” he said.

Making App Engine a paid service is another step toward establishing the developer ecosystem we described in December. While Google wouldn’t confirm our suspicions, Koomen did point out that it’s possible to write an App Engine application restricted to only those within your own domain. If that ecosystem prediction comes true, Google will have a platform for writing, running, and selling software to millions of Google Apps users. Think AppExchange for small and medium-sized businesses.

Here are the details on the new pricing for developers who go beyond their free quotas:

• $0.10 per CPU core hour of computing
• $0.10 per GB of inbound traffic and $0.12 per GB of outbound traffic
• $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application
• $0.0001 per email sent by the application

Google will continue to offer free accounts, although their capacity will be reduced from where it is today. Koomen said the goal is to make a “well-written” web application — that handles about 5 million page views a month — free, and for developers to pay beyond this amount.

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Tags: app engine, AppExchange, GOOG, google

Microsoft is hoping people will use Photosynth to document the inauguration. In partnership with CNN, they’re asking people to upload 1-3 pictures, no more than 10MB each, and email them. The result will be a three-dimensional record of the event.

That’s a lot of data. Having millions of people with cameras taking a picture at the same time gives Photosynth a lot to work with. I’m going to make an educated guess how much.

There are around 2 million people going to the inauguration (an astonishing 0.6 percent of the entire population). Let’s assume that one-tenth of those people are in eyeshot of the event, having cameras whose pictures are a useful vantage point.

How big will those picture files be? Well, the cameras at the event have a wide range of resolutions (and file sizes), with modern cameras clocking in around 8MBytes. I’m going to assume around 800 KBytes, compressed, which is fairly typical from what I see on Flickr.

That’s 38 Gigabytes of pictures Photosynth could have to chew on if this project gets attention.

Think about it another way: If each person there with a camera takes 50 pictures, some 250 million images — around 18.6 terabytes of data — is going to make its way to Flickr, Picassa, and other cloud storage areas.

In other words, the inauguration may represent the greatest influx of user-generated content onto the Internet, in one day, ever.

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Customer relationship management giant Salesforce.com just gobsmacked the fledgling community management industry with its launch of a customer support service called Service Cloud. While initially positioned as a tool for customer service, it also tracks interactions with various online communities.

This puts Salesforce on a collision course with community monitoring startups. After all, monitoring a conversation is one thing, but responding to it is another entirely — the domain of CRM, something Salesforce knows better than almost anyone else.

Get popular on the Internet, and you’ll have thousands of close personal friends who want you to pay attention to them. Unless you’re a social media rock star like Chris Brogan, who claims to be able to use Twitter at scale, you’re going to need some help.

Using a combination of keyword search, web crawling, and visualizations, companies such as Visible Technologies, Radian6, Techrigy, and Cymfony help you track your newfound popularity by measuring and organizing conversations with anyone who’s interested in your brand or your company. Others, such as Keenkong, are still in stealth mode.

But monitoring thousands of conversations across Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and blog comments is only part of the challenge. You still have to respond to them. If you automate your responses, you sound inauthentic. Imagine sending a message on Twitter and getting a 140-character form letter in return: You’d unfollow that person pretty fast. So you need to assign the task of following up to a human.

This moves community management tools from the world of social network analytics into that of customer relationship management. And while some of these startups have basic CRM features, that’s still a world Salesforce dominates.

While Service Cloud, which looks like the fruit of Salesforce’s 2008 acquisition of Instranet, initially targets customer service interactions, it’s a small step from there to marketing and sales interactions across social networks. Ultimately, Salesforce is building a tool that companies can use to engage with their markets across all online channels. Providers of community monitoring tools know they’ll need to pay attention to the new gorilla in their midst.

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Identi.ca’s plans to build an open-source alternative to Twitter got a vote of confidence this week with an investment from the VCs at Montreal Start Up. While the amount of the financing wasn’t disclosed, Montreal Start Up Managing Partner John Stokes said the firm invests between C$150,000 ($120,135) and C$400,000 ($320,329) per deal.

A bigger question is why microblogging companies are getting any investment at all. If Twitter can’t find revenues with the vast majority of market share, why would an open-source version make money? Identi.ca founder and CEO Evan Prodromou says open source gives the company “commercialization options that Twitter doesn’t [have].” For example the company can charge a fee for public or private implementations, or be the basis for microblogs on other web sites.

Identi.ca has some other tricks up its sleeve, too. Their APIs are Twitter-compatible, so they should work with third-party features like search, hashtags and analytics. And it’s a federated model: You can run an identi.ca instance privately, or share messages with other identi.ca servers. That allows hybrid public/private deployments that may sit better with enterprise customers.

Yammer and Present.ly have gone after those enterprise customers, and Socialtext recently added a Signals function for employee messaging. But Identi.ca’s taking a different path. “I don’t want to be a tiny company where we get paid for 100 percent of the installs, but have a tiny base,” said Prodromou. “I’d much rather see tens of millions of installs, and make conversions off a relatively small percent of them.”

Nor is Prodromou fazed by the Twitter imitators. “I think we’re over the hump of the yet-another-micromessaging-tool wave of the summer of 2008,” he said. “The more people know about Twitter, the more entrepreneurs and CIOs there are looking for a platform like ours on which to build.”

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Posted by Alistair Croll on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  43 Comments
Tags: Identi.ca, Microblogging, Montrealstartup, Twitter

Joyent today announced it has agreed to acquire Reasonably Smart, a fledgling cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git, for an undisclosed amount. While on the surface it might look like simple industry consolidation, Reasonably Smart’s technology will in fact help Joyent compete with emerging service-centric clouds while retaining an open model that makes developers comfortable.

You might think the deal is just cloud roll-up: Reasonably Smart was a very small startup. David Young, Joyent’s CEO, said the company–whose backers include PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel– is in “a strong financial position that supports making strategic acquisitions.” Dig a bit deeper, however, and the deal is more than just a roll-up. Joyent gets an open platform with which to attract developers while preparing the company for the looming threat of Google and Microsoft.

Joyent, along with other infrastructure-centric clouds like Amazon’s EC2 and Rackspace’s Mosso, let subscribers see their machines. Because they virtualize at the hardware level, these clouds support a wide range of development languages. Users aren’t locked in: They can take their applications out of the cloud and run them themselves. But this model also means customers have to worry about operating their virtual infrastructure, undermining the promised scalability of cloud computing.

By contrast, service-centric cloud models like Google’s App Engine, 10Gen and Microsoft’s Azure hide the infrastructure from developers. A subscriber doesn’t worry about scaling. Instead, they fret over lock-in — the inability to leave their cloud provider when things go wrong because they’re dependent on its proprietary features.

With Reasonably Smart, Joyent can strike a balance between infrastructure and service. Developers write applications in JavaScript, using extensions for things like I/O and storage. These applications can run on a developer’s desktop, in a private data center, or in a cloud. Of course, Joyent’s betting its operational expertise will convince people to run it in their cloud. It’s a service model, but one that subscribers can leave if they want to.

Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman remarked last year at our Structure conference that he wanted an open cloud model that could scale indefinitely, independent of infrastructure concerns. “We intend to keep this new Joyent offering completely open-source,” he said of today’s acquisition.

The move toward service-based clouds is part of a trend that will shape cloud computing in 2009. This year, Google and Microsoft will roll out production-grade clouds that have features like search, mapping, licensing, social graph and authentication baked right in.

To compete, infrastructure clouds need to round out their open offerings with built-in services while trying to retain the openness of their infrastructure heritage. Amazon, which has plenty of services, from SimpleDB to S3, continues to extend its offering with value-added services like CDNs, billing and management consoles — even at the expense of its ecosystem of existing vendors that have built similar tools atop EC2.

That makes Joyent’s acquisition look, well, reasonably smart.

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Tags: 10Gen, Amazon, Azure, EC2, Git, google app engine, Javascript, Joyent, Microsoft, Rackspace, Reasonably Smart

Until now, Google’s App Engine has been a great playground for coders: Everyone gets a daily quota of computing resources to play with. But without understanding how pricing will work when you go beyond those quotas, it’s been harder to understand business models built on it. Today, however, Google has shown us how the pricing model will work.

The approach is similar to AdWords: You set a daily budget, and when your application exceeds its free quota for that day, additional capacity comes out of the budget. The cost is split across processing, storage and bandwidth.

It’s easy for Google to offer a free daily quota because App Engine isn’t built around virtual machines the way competitors like Amazon’s EC2 are: You’re not paying by machine, because there aren’t any machines. Competition from Google’s free quota model may encourage other clouds such as Amazon to introduce free cloud computing quotas for small-traffic applications; meanwhile, Google is carefully launching an ecosystem for developers to build and sell their cloud-based software.

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Tags: google, app engine

Are clouds fundamentally less secure? A story today in the Guardian lists cloud security as one of the things we’ll worry about in 2009, citing a recent survey commissioned by — big surprise — security companies.

I don’t believe that clouds themselves will cause the security breaches and data theft they anticipate; in many ways, clouds will result in better security. Here’s why:

• Fewer humans – Most computer breaches are the result of human error; only 20-40 percent stem from technical malfunctions. Cloud operators that want to be profitable take humans out of the loop whenever possible.
• Better tools – Clouds can afford high-end data protection and security monitoring tools, as well as the experts to run them. I trust Amazon’s operational skills far more than my own.
• Enforced processes – You could probably get a co-worker to change your company’s IT infrastructure. But try doing it with a cloud provider without the proper authorization: You simply won’t be able to.
• Not your employees — Most security breaches are committed by internal employees. Cloud operators don’t work for you. When it comes to corporate espionage, employees are a much more likely target.

So where are the risks?

“The potential exists for security challenges like data breaches, data intermixing with other vendors, and exposure to security vulnerabilities that [enterprises] may not be exposed to in the infrastructure they own and manage,” John Pironti, chief information risk strategist at Compucom, told me.

With any new technology, there are bound to be exploits we haven’t thought of. But they’re more likely to be part of the management tools used to transfer and modify cloud data, as well as remote tools used to access applications in the cloud, than the clouds themselves.

There are real reasons to be careful when moving your data into a cloud. But be sure you’re worried about the right things. Otherwise you risk looking like a panicky server-hugger who wants to sleep with a copy of your data under your pillow.

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Despite decades of effort, troubleshooting applications is still hard. ExtraHop, which comes out of stealth today with the launch of its Application Delivery Assurance Appliance, thinks it’s got the answer. Backed with $1.5 million from Madrona Venture Partners, the 10-person company is capitalizing on recent increases in switch and processing capacity that make it possible to analyze all the traffic on a network.

Traditional IT wisdom says there are three basic ways to see what applications are doing: Put agents everywhere; ask the switches and routers what they see; or sniff the traffic on the wire. None is perfect. Agents consume CPU, and need care and feeding.  Switches are too busy forwarding packets to interpret what’s going on. And sniffing traffic means plugging in everywhere on the network, and drinking from a fire hose of bytes.

But networks and processors have come a long way. Now, switches are powerful enough to make a copy of all the traffic on a network without skipping a beat.

Companies like NetQOS and NetScout make products that capture and analyze traffic, but they mostly stop at the TCP layer. That can result in misleading diagnoses — such as thinking a server is responding quickly when in fact it’s returning an application error that the analyzer can’t see. “I think real-time visibility beyond L4 is the primary differentiator,” ExtraHop’s founder and CEO, Jesse Rothstein, told me.

Interpreting application conversations in real time takes powerful computation. ExtraHop’s team, whose skills were honed at F5 Networks, seems up to the task: John Tharp, a strategic monitoring engineer at spend management SaaS firm Concur, has been trying a beta of the product on a network with 650 devices and 500 Mbps of traffic. “We’ve been able to see problems easily — things like virtual switches dropping packets internally,” said Tharp.

To pull this off, ExtraHop’s appliance creates a “Cliff’s Notes” of each transaction it sees. For example, it might see a database query and record how long it took, what table was accessed, and any errors. These transactions are kept for 30 days in a data store custom-built for the job. “We had to rebuild it from scratch several times before we got it right,” said Rothstein.

The company still has work to do. Its appliance is missing some key features, like expert systems, better auto-configuration, and the ability to read encrypted data. And the number of protocols is limited. “I wish it had VoIP and iSCSI support,” said Tharp. But ExtraHop may be on to something: Networks that can create a copy of everything without slowing down change how we think about data capture, and as a result, about how we monitor applications.

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Posted by Alistair Croll on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: apps, data monitoring, extrahop

Google recently announced an extension framework for Chrome, adding the ability to run extra software in the browser. It’s a feature many had long considered missing from Google’s browser — and one that has been key to Firefox’s popularity.

But with the Chrome extensions, Google is doing much more than just playing catch-up with Firefox. An extensible browser is the missing piece of a much bigger puzzle: By tying its App Engine to Google Apps (more details in the App Engine blog), the company has delivered a complete ecosystem for cloud ISVs.

All software ecosystems need four basic things:

1. A platform — A complete cloud platform is distributed, ubiquitous, and works both offline and on. App Engine lets developers build the server-side portion and not worry about scaling. And Chrome’s extensions let coders build a cross-platform user interface that leverages the Gears framework to work even when disconnected.
2. Rich APIs — All those apps can use authentication, chat, OpenSocial, calendaring, Checkout, search, mapping, and other Google services. That makes it easy to build rich apps with familiar components.
3. Administration — Google Apps lets an administrator purchase, provision and manage permissions for an app. Deployment is easy: Once you’ve found the app you want in the Google Marketplace, just click the “add” button, then install the Chrome extension.
4. A market — Google Apps has 10 million active users and is signing up some 3,000 new companies a day, according to Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise.

With the Chrome extensions, Google has made it possible for ISVs to launch ready-made niche applications for the cloud. It’s the same thing Facebook did with its API and Salesforce did with AppExchange; in Google’s case, ISVs now have a turnkey channel that can reach small businesses easily.

The ability to let Apps customers buy third-party software isn’t quite ready yet. “Now, Google Apps administrators can also deploy several new Google applications hosted on App Engine to members of their organizations with Google Apps Labs,” said Pete Koomen, product manager for App Engine.

So for example, a dentist’s office could use Google’s Docs suite for word processing and spreadsheets, but also buy third-party apps from Marketplace — one for patient scheduling, and another for invoicing. They’d all work smoothly together, online and off, using the Apps/Docs/Chrome ecosystem.

With Google looking to find revenues beyond advertising, monetizing those 10 million accounts has got to be a big priority. Selling third-party applications can’t be far off. Of course, these apps will work with any browser. But they’ll likely work better with Chrome and its extensions.

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Posted by Alistair Croll on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  7 Comments

Citing changes to its billing and costs that are doubling every month, Twitter announced that it will no longer support outbound SMS to Canadians. Twitter’s searching for a business model (and a Business Product Manager to help out), and in the meantime it has to curtail costs — but it doesn’t help that Canadian carriers are trying to charge huge fees for text messaging, resulting in consumer lawsuits. Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice called the decision by Bell and Telus a “poorly thought out decision,” back in July, but reneged in August following meetings with the carriers, saying, “I would encourage consumers dissatisfied with existing plans to seek alternatives. The telecommunications market in Canada is dynamic — choice is available.”

Given today’s news, it would seem that alternatives aren’t available, at least for Twitter, and probably not for Canadians in general.

The statement from Twitter is below.

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212). The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live. There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

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Posted by Alistair Croll on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  14 Comments
Tags: SMS, Twitter

With a flurry of announcements in recent weeks, Amazon has extended its cloud computing lead. The beta label’s gone. It can run Windows applications. By investing in firms like Elastra, it’s tackling enterprise deployment. And there’s a 99.95 percent uptime guarantee.

Much of this is a pre-emptive strike at Microsoft’s upcoming cloud offering. Microsoft has a huge advantage: It owns the stack from OS and virtual machine through to application. Amazon wants to compete on reliability and performance, rather than software suites and licensing. But there are still some things missing before enterprises will really embrace it.

Back in May, most of the people we asked were more likely to trust Amazon than Microsoft with their enterprise applications. But while enterprise customers are using Amazon already, in many cases that use is limited to a department or a short-term project. If Amazon wants to capture entire IT departments, it needs to prove it’s as good or better than in-house infrastructure. And that means delivering responsive, highly available applications, not just an SLA.

To accomplish this, Amazon needs to tackle performance and availability at an architectural level. When companies build their own applications, they rely on building blocks like load-balancing, WAN acceleration, managed DNS and redundant data centers. Fortunately, this is where much of Amazon’s roadmap leads.

• Network performance: Amazon’s CDN will get static content closer to users. With availability zones, Amazon can also get computation near the edge. All of this reduces the time it takes to deliver bits to users. But it can be faster still: Modern enterprises squeeze every millisecond out of the network. Amazon should also add route optimization, HTTP and TCP optimization to really address network delay.


Amazon's plans for integrated scaling, monitoring, and load balancing in EC2

• Processing performance: Internet architects improve server performance with load-balancing. First send the request to the fastest data center, then send it to the fastest machine in that data center. If there aren’t any fast machines, the newly announced dynamic scaling will make new ones. All that’s missing (though hinted at) is the ability to measure user experience so EC2 knows when to add new servers. Amazon needs a complete load balancing/monitoring/scaling strategy — with proper controls so IT staff can manage it — to make elastic computing a reality. While they’re at it, a performance SLA would be great, too.
• Network availability: Those same load balancing technologies improve uptime, using DNS or BGP to bypass unreachable data centers. Amazon needs to launch a SimpleDNS service, tied to availability zones and performance, that gives operators more control. It’s going to have to deal with DNS when it launches its CDN anyway. This looks less like managed DNS (Amazon uses UltraDNS already) and more like products from F5, Citrix or others. Amazon also needs to open up about its carriers and peering arrangements for enterprises to feel comfortable.
• Processing availability: Big Internet sites don’t achieve high uptime with machines that always work. Instead, they monitor for failure and then have the load balancers take out bad servers. That way, overall availability can be high, even when individual components are broken. Amazon should add load testing and profiling capabilities – particularly since EC2 doesn’t give users deep visibility into the platform — to ensure that applications work worldwide under stress.

As Amazon CTO Werner Vogels pointed out, enterprises like cloud computing for its economics, its elastic capacity and its ability to deliver high reliability. With this roadmap, Amazon goes after Microsoft’s weak spots. But it’s not there yet.

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Posted by Alistair Croll on GigaOM  |  Permalink  |  5 Comments
Tags: Amazon, AWS, CDN., Citrix, F5 Networks, FastTCP, GSLB, Microsoft