If recent research is any indication, Amazon.com and Google are winning the cloud game.
Evans Data on Tuesday released a report (registration required) on how developers perceive cloud service providers related to cloud services offerings, including their completeness and the companies' ability to execute on the vision.
Janel Garvin, the founder of Evans Data and the author of the report, provides excellent insight into the current state of the market and how quickly things could change, if certain large vendors (notably AT&T and Microsoft) got their acts together more quickly.
Given their robust services, it isn't surprising that Amazon and Google top the list. And although IBM, VMware, and Microsoft trail, each offers important components of cloud infrastructure.
... Read MoreIn trying to figure out what exactly is at the heart of the problem (don't say Apple's "control issues"), I heard an interesting perspective on this brouhaha from Todd Barr, vice president of marketing at Bandwidth.com, a nationwide CLEC voice carrier that sells voice and data services to businesses. (Note: Fellow CNET blogger Matt Asay provides a good overview of the company's FreePBX product here.)
Barr believes that what this controversy boils down to is number portability. Increasingly, our phone numbers (especially mobile numbers) have become our identity, and the FCC enacted the number portability act some time ago to make sure that businesses and consumers can take their number with them when they switch carriers. The FCC believes this is important because number portability ensures competition among providers and allows businesses and consumers to keep their number to ensure continuity of their identity.
At the time, the FCC contemplated carrier competition - but now, Barr described, there are these "meta" carriers, like Apple, that have a key control point in the telecom ecosystem: the phone user experience. "Just like users want to control their number and identity, they also will increasingly want to control their own telephony experience - like having one number, that can ring to any phone you specify, and even display the correct called-ID number when you call from any phone. Ultimately, I think the crux of the issues is how far the idea of number portability extends to the entire user telephony experience, not just the phone number."
This will be an increasingly important issue to carriers as they experiment with fixed-mobile convergence features that let business users control their call flows in more intuitive ways, such as sharing one number and common features across wireless and fixed networks.
It will also become very important for services like Google voice that abstract the number from the carrier and make the networks dumb pipes.
For users to ultimately be in control of their telephony experience and to encourage the next wave of telephony innovation, the concept of portability will need to extend beyond just numbers to the telephony user experience.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
Looks like Google is starting to take Apps Premier a bit more seriously, providing users with SLA credits for the August outage and realizing that the guy who chose Google Apps has to report to someone else when things go haywire.
Not much more to comment on...I hope they make it work. I switched entirely to browser-based Gmail and I'm still liking it.
E-mail pasted below from the Google Apps team:
---------------------------------Given the production incidents that occurred in August, we'll be extending the full SLA credit to all Google Apps Premier customers for the month of August, which represents a 15-day extension of your service. SLA credits will be applied to the new service term for accounts with a renewal order pending. This credit will be applied to your account automatically so there's no action needed on your part.
We've also heard your guidance around the need for better communication when outages occur. Here are three things that we're doing to make things better:
1. We're building a dashboard to provide you with system status information. This dashboard, which we aim to make available in a few months, will enable us to share the following information during an outage:
1. A description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact. Our belief is during the course of an outage, we should be singularly focused on solving the problem. Solving production problems involves an investigative process that's iterative. Until the problem is solved, we don't have accurate information around root cause, much less corrective action, that will be particularly useful to you. Given this practical reality, we believe that informing you that a problem exists and assuring you that we're working on resolving it is the useful thing to do.
2. A continuously updated estimated time-to-resolution. Many of you have told us that it's important to let you know when the problem will be solved. Once again, the answer is not always immediately known. In this case, we'll provide regular updates to you as we progress through the troubleshooting process.
2. In cases where your business requires more detailed information, we'll provide a formal incident report within 48 hours of problem resolution. This incident report will contain the following information:
a. business description of the problem, with emphasis on user impact;
b. technical description of the problem, with emphasis on root cause;
c. actions taken to solve the problem;
d. actions taken or to be taken to prevent recurrence of the problem; and
e. time line of the outage.
3. In cases where your business requires an in-depth dialogue about the outage, we'll support your internal communication process through participation in post-mortem calls with you and your management team.
---------------------------------Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.
Peter Wayner at Infoworld published a good overview of Cloud offerings from Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid. The main takeaway: Cloud Computing is as nebulous as it is cumulus.
The first surprise is that the services are wildly different. While many parts of Web hosting are pretty standard, the definition of "cloud computing" varies widely. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud offers you full Linux machines with root access and the opportunity to run whatever apps you want. Google's App Engine will also let you run whatever program you want -- as long as you specify it in a limited version of Python and use Google's database.
The services offer wildly different amounts of hand-holding, and at different layers in the stack. When this assistance works and lines up with your needs, it makes the services seem like an answer to your prayers, but when it doesn't, you'll want to rename it "iron-ball-and-chain computing." Every neat feature that simplifies the workload does it by removing some switches from your reach, forcing you into a set routine that is probably but not necessarily what you'd prefer.
With zero fanfare Google quietly slipped new features into their Docs suite. It's like CSI Silicon Valley when you use their tools.
Since switching to Google Apps Premier I am basically 100% browser-based for my email. But, for docs, spreadsheets etc. I can't seem to make the Google stuff work for me. Something just doesn't feel right about the GUIs, let alone the reduced functionality versus applications like Excel.
The new templates are not the most beautiful, but just having them available will make Google Apps a lot more appealing for non-techie business users. Beyond templates, users can now upload, preview and share PDFs, save files as PPT, drag and drop cells and use new chart types.
Despite the many hiccups I've had with Google Apps, the products are definitely getting better. And as MS Office continues to bloat and get weirder (that ribbon thing is cuckoo) the alternatives are closer to meeting broad needs.
Let us all dare to dream that anything from Google will ever graduate beyond Beta.
Via Lifehacker
My other theory is that we can eventually get rid of Outlook. If there is any app that people are more addicted to than Outlook, it's Gmail. And now we've suckered them into using it for business.
... Read MoreSalesforce.com's tie-in with Google Apps makes Salesforce the complete center of the user's universe.
But in a new-school twist, neither of these applications completely locks you in. You can get your data out, if you need to (albeit somewhat painfully) from Salesforce, and since you have your Google e-mail stored outside of the Salesforce system, you can effectively leave whenever you want and resplit the applications, should you so desire.
While the technical details are not totally clear, this appears to be an example of Web-oriented architecture, or it at least demonstrates the idea that an abstraction layer allows for data to be more easily integrated. Or maybe it's PaaS (platform as a service)--I am sure it's some acronym.
The theoretical benefits of the combined service outweigh the negatives (mainly clarity around service-level agreements, security, and Google's perpetual beta tests)-at least for now.
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