Google to offer “Google Office”

Aaron Ricadela of InformationWeek writes:

Google this week will launch Google Apps for Your Domain, a software bundle aimed at small and midsize companies. The free, ad-supported package combines Google’s E-mail, calendar, and instant messaging with Web site creation software. It will be hosted in Google’s data center, branded with customers’ domain names, and packaged with management tools for IT pros.

That’s the first step. Later this year, Google plans to add its Writely word processor and Google Spreadsheets to the suite, build online collaboration features that work across its applications, and market the whole package to large companies for a fee. Google will include IT-friendly features such as APIs, directory-server integration, guaranteed performance levels, and telephone tech support.

Instead of trying to displace the hundreds of millions of copies of Office installed on business PCs, Google will try to snare users once they start sharing the Word and Excel files they’ve created. “The right way to view Writely and Google Spreadsheets, especially in the context of a larger business, isn’t necessarily as a replacement for Word or Excel,” says Matt Glotzbach, head of enterprise products at Google. “They’re the collaboration component of that.”
…
Google’s plans include prompting people who send Microsoft Office documents using Gmail to translate those files into Google’s formats for editing on Google.com, presumably in a forum where ad space is up for sale. Gmail messages that include attached files currently prompt users with links to download the documents or view them on the Web. Glotzbach envisions a third link to edit the documents online and generate E-mail to other users in a group when the edits are done. Writely can read files created by Microsoft Word, and Google Spreadsheets can read and create Excel files and formulas, though it’s unable to handle more complex Excel functions such as macros.

“That’s a brilliant idea, because it would allow them in a way to shanghai Microsoft’s corporate customers into the Google fold,” says Tim Bajarin, president of consulting company Creative Strategies. Google is increasingly using its applications to entice Internet users to store more personal and business data on Google’s servers, Bajarin says. There, the company can correlate the information with online advertisements users are most likely to click on.

It already does this with apps like Gmail and the Google Desktop search tool. But there’s much room for expansion. In June, it introduced the ability to store digital photos managed in Google’s desktop Picasa software on company servers. Bajarin predicts hosted storage for digital music and other files can’t be far off. “Their goal is to be the hosted back end for your digital life,” he says. “Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to keep this from happening to their corporate apps.”

Inside Amazon’s EC2

ZDNet’s Dan Farber writes:

I talked to Peter Desantis, director of EC2 about the target market for the service. “EC2 is aimed at developers–everyone from the developer in a dorm room rapid prototyping and wanting access to highly scalable computing capacity to see if an algorithm scales to 1,000 node to the fledgling startup without capital to pre-buy capacity for a spike that may happen or the established company looking for a novel way to increase flexibility of using computation or storage and to reduce cost,” he said.

The service is designed for real-time Web applications, providing the ability to rapidly provision large amounts of compute capacity, configuring it and paying for it as you need it, Desantis said. EC2 can also be used for traditional batch and data-intensive applications, but customers would need to provision a grid framework on on top of it. “If patterns develop for grid computing, we or anyone else could institutionalize it,” Desantis said. “A primary design goal was to be flexibile. We have chosen not to provide a constrained application processing framework. We allow developers to run the software they want to run, and to take advantage of the near-instantaneous provisioning and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Amazon to sell “computing resources”

Amazon announced beta version of its new Amazon EC2 (or Elastic Compute Cloud) service:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Limited Beta 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.

Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables “compute” in the cloud. Amazon EC2’s simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements change. Amazon EC2 changes the economics of computing by allowing you to pay only for capacity that you actually use.

SAP’s top strategist

I found good illustration to my previous post of how important for top ERP vendors to communicate their strategy. Tom Foremski writes about his meeting with Jeff Nolan, “one of SAP’s key strategists, and a former venture capitalist at SAP Ventures”:

Mr Nolan has an interesting job. He runs the Apollo Group, it is a strategy and communications organization within SAP, that is sometimes referred to as the “Attack Oracle” group–because Oracle is SAP’s largest competitor in enterprise applications. And with Oracle’s acquisitions of PeopleSoft and Siebel, Oracle is getting serious about its so far lackluster applications business and is eyeing SAP’s huge 32,000+ customer base.

Mr Nolan’s goal is to make sure that SAP develops a strategy that enables it to compete against Oracle, whether it is through acquisitions, investments or just pure communications of SAP’s message–the goal is to rise above any noise that Oracle produces.

Mr Nolan has a key role to play within SAP, and it is one that he clearly recognizes because of his blogging activities. Mr Nolan writes one of the top VC blogs and because he is involved in the blogosphere he understands the importance of online influencers and how this process works. [That's the reason I get to have a face-to-face with him.]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison commands a lot of attention and can easily insert Oracle’s point of view into many influential publications, consulting groups, and Wall Street brokerages. But Mr Nolan’s knowledge of how ideas and conversations propagate around the internet, gained from his experience as an A-list blogger, works to SAP’s advantage.

ERP software: Open Source or Traditional?

Now, after Oracle purchased PeopleSoft, it is SAP and Oracle who are the only players in the market segment of large corporations. These two vendors have top of the notch solutions with functionality both deep and wide. “What are the reasons companies decide to buy Oracle vs. SAP and vice versa?” I hear this question few times during last months.

Believe me or not, but functional nuances is the last thing to be considered today. The decision to buy ERP (ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning) software usually is very strategic. That is why it is product (and vendor) strategy that matters most. That means today clients tend to consider what vendor and its product will look like in 3-5 years, what is vendor’s development strategy, acquisition strategy, etc. And both SAP and Oracle pay much attention to communicate their strategy. (My opinion, that here Oracle looks better, more open and consistent, still…)

For big companies it is also important that vendor has proven and controlled financial stability (for vendors it usually means being public) and will exist (in any form) virtually forever, or at list for a very long time, and will not disappear one day. That is why big company will most likely to chose between Oracle and SAP, giving no chance to open source packages WebERP, SugarCRM, TinyERP, Compiere and others.

But what about mid- and low-market? Here chances of open source packages will be much higher. They still have to struggle with traditional players and have both pros and cons being compared against them. (Detail analysis is not subject of this post, but offer good topic for separate one.)

However a very special “opportunity segment” are companies with the same or similar philosophy like rapidly growing start-up companies. Open source model gives tremendous opportunity for such companies to save costs from the very beginning, contributing to financial success (of lower financial dependence) and giving opportunity to invest into development and operations.

We know such examples as SpikeSource. And I am sure there are others, so you are welcome to add more examples and to express your opinion in the Comments.

Epson RD-1s

Epson announced R-D1s, “a rangefinder camera that’s trying as hard as it can to look like an old-school film camera”. This is the coolest digital camera I ever saw!

RFID Virus

InfoSecDaily has a story from Freedom To Tinker telling about paper that describes “how RFID tags might be used to propagate computer viruses”:

Suppose that some subset of the world’s RFID readers had an input-processing bug of this general type, so that whenever one of these readers scanned an RFID tag containing diabolically constructed input, the reader would be hijacked and would execute some command contained in that input. If this were the case, an RFID-carried virus would be possible.

A virus attack might start with a single RFID tag carrying evil data. When a vulnerable reader scanned that tag, the reader’s bug would be triggered, causing the reader to execute a command specified by that tag. The command would reconfigure the reader to make it write copies of the evil data onto tags that it saw in the future. This would spread the evil data onto more tags. When any of those tags came in contact with a vulnerable reader, that reader would be infected, turning it into a factory for making more infected tags. The infection would spread from readers to new tags, and from tags to new readers. Before long many tags and readers would be infected.