Google App Engine

My Dad wrote this, and I don't think I can say it any better:

http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2008/04/10/google-app-engine-googzillas-slow-small-baby-steps/

Enterprise Search, Um, Sucks

I have to mention that my Dad wrote a posting today about the lack of satisfaction among employees in regards to their enterprise. While most of us will nod our head in agreement given our life experiences, it is refreshing to see an actual study quantifying the dissatisfaction that we all know anecdotally.

Very few enterprise vendors take user satisfaction surveys because they IT managers know the results. The lack of use of enterprise search is evidence enough. The clients of enterprise software companies are the IT who can appreciate the amount of technology that takes place to index the amount of disparate and growing content in the enterprise. (From and academic perspective, it is fascinating.)

I have been in some enterprise focus groups where we did gauge user satisfaction, and they are painful. When we had our default interface, our search  got low scores. However, when we put up the same reach results in the Google interface (on our system), the scores shot up. As frustrating as this is, it is reality. Reality that people refuse to accept.

However, IT managers who do not take this fact into consideration are quickly approaching the time when a business manager will say, "Why don't we just Google it." While you may have an avalanche of information from large analysts companies to prove your point, you may soon face a user revolt and a veto from the business side.

As I said in a previous post, the "SaaS in a box" approach by Google will prove harder and harder to defend as Google announces more "enterprise cloud application" as they announced yesterday with the App Engine.

As the study shows, and let me know if this sounds familiar to another quagmire, you can pour millions of dollars in something with good intentions, but if the end users don't accept or like its presence compared to what they know, it will be hard to handle the user "insurgency."

Admittedly, we at Adhere used to fight this battle, and we have given up and devoted ourselves to implementing Google based enterprise solution, and believe me, when I say our life is better now. It could be better for you too...

Google App Engine

As Techcrunch reported, Google has finally released its long awaited answer to Amazon's web services and entered the hosted web application market. 

For users of Google Apps (like myself), the App Engine allows any business to access Google's massive IT infrastructure. With a few savvy python developers, your days of purchasing hardware and software licenses are (finally) coming to an end. As many people have pointed out, the App Engine only supports python and that will prove a deterrent for some developers at the beginning of this program. Python is the language that powers Google, so it makes sense for Google to start within its own framework. Google insists that support for other development languages, such as ruby, will come shortly.

However, let's take a step back from the technical aspects to understand the business implication of the the Google App Engine. A business can immediately conduct their entire online business within the Google infrastructure for only $50 / year per user. While Google has not released the pricing yet for popular applications (roughly 5 million page views per month), but the pricing is sure to be competitive with Amazon Web Services, which is already has low pricing options.

Additionally, rumors abound about a Salesforce and Google partnership. Little doubt that a combination of Salesforce's application development platform and Google's App Engine could make for an even more powerful combination of cloud computing.

AWS Failure??? People Caring is a Success

Techcruch posted a note today about the downtime of the Amazon web services. While the downtime certainly affects those startups that have built their entire application within Amazon's Suite of web services, many people do not realize that you can build your web site within Amazon's hosting facility.

However, the news is that people and businesses are greatly affected when Amazon Web Services have gone down. What started as an experiment now affects many business and shows that enterprise cloud computing is not just a hobby for savvy entrepreneurs.

If you are not familiar with Amazon Web Services, they offer four major "clouds."

1) Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

2) Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

3) Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

4) Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) offers a reliable, highly scalable, hosted queue for storing messages as they travel between computers.

 Google has taken notice of the amount of people leveraging Amazon's infrastructure and most expect a major announcement tonight about "Big Table" or Google's database in the sky.

Certainly more tomorrow if that happens.