Posted by Philippe Creytens at 16:43
Google may have great ambitions with their OS for tablets, the reality is that Honeycomb tablets are expensive and (hardly) available. The iPad sets the standards.
So you have bought an iPad and want to use it for Google Apps? What are the tricks of the trade? A small summary…
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 15:01
The recent announcement that the site of the British Royal Wedding of Prince William is hosted on Google App Engine, did not make me frown my eyebrows. The scalability and uptime of GAE are well-known. GAE runs on the same infrastructure as Google Search. Search remained just as fast as usual when Michael Jackson died and millions of searches were simultaneously being done on Google.
Google App Engine appears to be the ideal platform to host your website. Especially if you are already using Google Apps. True? Or not?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 13:53
Mid June last year, Steve Jobs stated that the post-PC era has arrived. He predicts that the tablet will become a replacement for the PC for many users. Others seem to think that tablets are to become extra devices, next to laptops or desktops.
For certain tasks, such as editing photos or movies, you need a lot of processing power (read: PC/laptop power). Apparently the faster processors now available in the iPad 2, make this type of work finally possible on a tablet.
Which made me think. Can I work exclusively on a tablet?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 19:12
Google has started a certification program for IT professionals that have demonstrated their expertise with Google Apps for Business.
The certification program responds to a need that both resellers and customers of Google Apps for Business have expressed. Both are looking for a way to separate the wheat from the chaff when looking for professionals that can assist deploying Google Apps.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 14:05
Apple is getting rather good at creating new markets out of nothing. A few years ago they did exactly that with the iPod and last year with the launch of the iPad.
It is rumored that Apple will soon announce the launch of the iPad version 2. What new goodies it will bring remains to be seen.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 15:04
When we talk about cloud solutions everyone immediately thinks of Google, Salesforce and Amazon. Very few people are familiar with Zoho. The Indian entrepreneur Sridgar Vembi and his company Zoho, bring an expanding number of cloud applications for CRM, project management, invoicing and much more.
Recently Robert Scobler, a well known US tech blogger, and Vembu met for an interview. This resulted in an interesting chat about the cloud, ChromeOS and the direction that companies are bound to head to.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 15:26
Google has started to mention the necessity of dealing with change management when migrating to Google Apps in their communication. As we have repeatedly stated, switching to Apps only for cost savings is not advisable. You can find out more about why and how to switch in our e-book “How to successfully deploy Google Apps“.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 14:41
Moving to the cloud is mostly initiated by moving ‘commodity IT’ services such as mail and calendar. Google, Microsoft and IBM/Lotus are trying to convince organizations not to have cold feet when thinking about moving to ‘the cloud’.
As cloud solution pioneers in the Benelux –we no longer have any servers– we see that after moving mail and calendars our satisfied customers, large or small, are eager to get more ‘cloud’.
In some cases the next steps are focused on implementing broad solutions such as CRM or document management solutions.
Others want to get rid of in-house developed applications and ask our advice on how to proceed. Clearly a difficult task that has some similarity with gazing into a crystal ball to come up with decent answers.
Amazon Web Services offers really great tools for developers: EC2, S3, RDS, and much more.
However you are stuck with managing infrastructure. Having to choose the right OS image, updating it and thinking about how your setup might need to scale, are only some of the side effects that come with going Amazon. Basically Amazon offers you a hypervirtualized environment on the public internet as a pay-as-go model where the developer needs to have a lot of knowledge on different IT topics.
MS Windows Azure is probably going to receive a lot of press attention in 2011. But it is, and will remain, primarily focused on .NET. Yes, I know Azure supports PHP, Ruby and Java, but I expect that PHP/Java/Ruby fan boys will prefer other solutions (see below).
Salesforce is ‘hot’ these days because of their recent acquisitions: Heroku, THE Ruby deployment platform, was recently acquired for $212 Mio. Soon Database.com will be able to provide cloud developers the power of an Oracle database for a minimal cost.
Even a blind man will see that cloud webdevelopers will be able to deploy very scalable applications with the trio Ruby on Rails, Heroku and Database.com without the infrastructure headaches.
And Google I hear you think?
Google prides themselves that Google App Engine is more and more being used.
But the success of GAE could be threatened by three factors: no support for SQL databases, Java and Python as the only supported development languages and a lack of an SLA with enterprise level support.
Nearly ten months after the announcement of SQL support and Google App Engine for Business, these announcements appear to remain vapourware.
As long as Google sticks to Bigtable as the only supported database, chances are pretty slim that enterprise applications, nearly all of them interacting with SQL databases, are going to end up on Google App Engine.
Our choice?
Not a 100% clear today, but Google App Engine in combination with Database.com is in our R&D plan for 2011. Unless if Google rolls out SQL support tomorrow.
Now, what would you choose and why?
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 14:00
In the telco world the standard for uptime is ‘five nines‘ or 99.999% uptime per month. This means that your phone may not be available for less than 25.9 seconds over a period of 30 days. Google said that last year they achieved an uptime of 99.984%. An unavailability of Gmail that is roughly less than 7 minutes per month.
Posted by Philippe Creytens at 18:16
Hybrid cloud computing, or how some want to be a bit pregnant.
That is the title of a small reaction I wrote when I was asked my opinion about ‘hybrid cloud computing‘
