Google building Business Apps

I read a very interesting post by software engineer Sergey Solyanik who tells his story of leaving Microsoft, going to work for Google and returning to Microsoft.


Its a balanced account of the reasons why he returned to Microsoft, What caught my eye and got me thinking was his opinions on the challenges Google has in building solutions targeted at business. Google along with its primary search products has built a series of popular "free" products. By being "free", Google enables its development teams to be more "agile" and release code to production environments frequently, however accordingly there seem to be fairly frequent introductions of new bugs and outages but by being "Free", the user base is also more accepting of these issues.

This would appear to be a major inhibitor to Business market dominance. As Google begins entering the business market, the dynamics totally change. You have to build apps which are an integral part of running a business, not just "free" nice to haves, otherwise you will need never get widespread adoptance. Businesses by their very nature are far less forgiving of problems and as such would prefer to pay to ensure adequate quality,reliability and support are in place for any products they choose to use in their business.

Technical Support for business with SLAs in place does not currently exist at Google.
This got me thinking about the Salesforce.com/Google Apps colloboration. This is a pretty smart move by Google. I have to think this would benefit Google more than Salesforce.com though. Google partners with a company with huge credibility in the business world and they also get to leverage the infrastructure for training and support of customers that Salesforce.com have in place. In a way, Google is outsourcing these functions to Salesforce.com.

This is all good for customers who are using Salesforce.com and Google Apps, but what about the others who don't use Salesforce.com but want to use Google Apps with agreed upon SLA's and support?

Its my guess though that Google is not going to setup huge Support and Client Service Departments, I think they will continue with outsourcing this part of the business and utilizing business partners.

Salesforce.com Data Centers are also more focused on running business apps with high percentage uptimes and SLA's in place. I am not sure how Google's distributed server farms will handle business applications at guaranteed Service levels.

Google are certainly big enough to make it in the Business Market, but its not going to be a quick win.

Is Microsoft Silverlight ready for prime time Business SaaS Development?

There is no doubting the success of Adobe's Flex development product set in the SaaS Web 2.X world and there is no doubt with the release of Microsoft Silverlight Version 2 beta, Microsoft is attempting to head the same way.

Silverlight 1 was clearly targeted at simple website development with video streaming, animations and javascript/Ajax dev framework to enable a richer web experience, but it wasn't close to being ready for business application development.

I spent some time researching SL2 in my continuing endeavours for improving SaaS user experience. It introduces some major functionality including

1. A cutdown .NET managed code environment as an alternative to Javascript. This will be an attractive feature for the literally millions of .NET developers out there.
2. Ability to generate and use proxies for consuming SOAP and RESTful based services (A critical requirement for Business applications who need access to hosted databases).
3. More standard controls such as listboxes and datagrid.
4. Linq to SQL

SL 2 is definitely a huge improvement over SL 1 but there are still some major pieces to the puzzle missing.

1. Certain key controls are yet to be released including a tab control. Tabs are a very common metaphor nowadays in business apps. I cannot seem to find a combobox implementation, the most basic of databound controls.
2. Linq to SQL is great for handling collections of generated proxy data objects but what about situations where the data schema is not known at compile time, for example CRM and Business Intelligence Applications
3. Third party vendors are still building their Silverlight components, vendors such as Infragistics, and Telerik having announced their intentions to release but have yet to do so.
4. Cannot merge external resource dictionaries which makes it difficult for dynamic skinning.
5. No concept of a right click. Which makes it difficult to build right click context menus. Can be done by Javascript hookups, but is not a default behavior in managed code form.

So is Silverlight ready for SaaS? Well, due to its flexible UI design foundations (XAML) which enable you to build your own controls and the new capabilities for managed code development and Service consumption, the answer is yes (if you have time to work around the controls that are lacking). But I suspect that many ISVs will wait before adopting Silverlight as their primary UI platform for delivering SaaS applications, otherwise they risk reinventing the wheel.

Preparing for the Business Cloud

An interesting interview with the head of Microsoft Office products, Chris Capossela provides a clear indication of a couple of things.

1. Microsoft is investing heavily in Cloud Computing
2. Cloud Computing is a serious player in not just the consumer space but in business also. ( And not just in Cloud CRM which Salesforce.com leads by a country mile, but in general business applications also)

According to this interview,

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research)
sees tens of millions of corporate e-mail accounts moving to its data centers
over the next five years, shifting to a business model that may thin profit
margins but generate more revenue.

Microsoft is adding 10,000 servers a month to its Cloud focused data centers. Thats 10,000 servers a month which apparently is equivalent to the entire server count for Facebook. Pretty impressive numbers.

The company said Coca Cola Enterprises Inc (CCE.N: Quote, Profile, Research)
signed up 70,000 seats for Exchange Online, switching over from IBM's Lotus
Domino system

70,000 seats for any software business is a major win, its a true Enterprise sale, and an accurate indicator of whats happening with the business cloud.

The article does indicate however the "Fence sitting" of Microsoft. They see themselves differentiated from traditional service players such as Amazon and Salesforce.com, because they still offer On Premise solutions.

I can see why On Premise for Enterprise, may still be preferred for some large scale multi country integration heavy type applications, but surely Microsoft must see its Email solutions heading up into the clouds? Email solutions don't differ from customer to customer which makes implementation and setup costs very low if not nil.

I know, I haven't used a locally hosted on premise email system in years, and don't see myself ever doing so again.

Its an exciting time as we see large scale vendors adapting to the presence of Cloud Computing in business.

A Microsoft Cloud Database. Now its starting to make sense.

I apologize in advance for this fairly technical article, but I wanted to post about this to highlight that Microsoft can produce some really impressive stuff on the Development side of things, even for SaaS.

It was announced fairly recently that Microsoft was planning to release a cloud version of its SQL Server DBMS, called Microsoft Data Services, (Whitepaper found here.).

There are a number of major players in this arena, including Google, Amazon and even Intuit but that isn't the focus of this blog post.

Despite Microsoft's sometimes "perceived" less than committed approach to SaaS and Cloud Computing in general, they always seem to come up with some great additions to their development platforms.

Their latest .NET framework 3.5 Platform introduces a component called Linq or Language Integrated queries. This component which is based upon Functional Language constructs and Lambda expression building blocks essentially provides a SQL language capability embedded in the C# and VB.NET language sets used by many. It provides an abstraction layer hiding database specific language constructs from client apps.

Example:

var query = from p in Contacts where p.LastName=="Wing" select p;

Linq can be used against all types of collections, and in fact the building blocks of Linq, Lambda Expressions and extension methods also simplifies many scenarios where you have to iterate through collections. In instances where you would traditionally write multi line code with a FOREACH statement you can replace with a single line.

string[] contacts= {"Troy","Jane","Kim"};
IEnumerable contactList= contacts.Select(p=> p += " Wing").
.Where(q=>q=="Troy");

So back to the reason why I am blogging about this and why its "starting to make sense", these technical features which can make developer's lives a lot easier, actually have a more significant and strategic use. They will form the development platform for ISV's to build apps against Microsofts Cloud Database. Because Linq is Database agnostic, it becomes the perfect tool to use in the SaaS world when building Multi-Tenant Client apps. It removes the need to write complex database specific code anywhere in your app.

It will simplify development, and provide the ability to bring to market a SaaS product requiring a database backend a lot more cheaply and quickly and perhaps open up the SaaS market to smaller organizations who normally couldn't afford to build such an app.

It would have taken several years for such significant features to be designed and implemented by Microsoft, so although I don't know whether this was intentional or not, Microsoft has been seriously thinking about architecture for Cloud Computing for quite a while.

Google, Firefox no match for Microsoft?

Computerworld recently published an article States slam Google, Firefox as no match for Microsoft
It leads off with

In a brief submitted to federal court, state antitrust regulators dismissed companies such as Google and Mozilla, and technologies such as Ajax and software-as-a-service, as piddling players that pose no threat to Microsoft's monopoly in the operating system and browser markets.

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They essentially want the courts to continue antitrust monitoring Microsoft for another 5 years until 2012

Another quote:

In their most recent brief, the states countered Microsoft's contention that Web-based companies -- Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo, eBay and others -- and new Web-centric technologies constitute what Microsoft dubbed a "competitive alternative to Windows."

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The Department of Justice is supporting Microsoft on this one.

Setting aside any arguments of Pro/Anti-Microsoft camps, is it not fair to say that despite Microsoft's dominance in the the Desktop/OS market, companies such as Google have experienced phenomenal success and growth in the web 2.0 and as such would it not be hypocritical to recognize that success and then try to restrict Microsoft further?