Googify your Application

I am fan of Google Apps(NASDAQ:GOOG) and I think it has real potential of replacing the Corporate Intranet.

I already love gmail better than outlook (I get more spam in my corporate email than in my inbox in gmail account -And note that I give my gmail id to all commercial entities and *DO NOT* give out my corporate email id to anyone ) and Google Calendar is fast taking up my usage by having the Webservices API , Multiple Calendars etc. For my thoughts on Google Documents refer my earlier post

Besides I love the ability to configure my home page and choose between a portlet that shows freeway traffic to my home , a googifed salesforce.com that shows the sales projections from salesforce.com and a custom homegrown interface to my project management tool showing the resource utilization for my account. The ability to combine my personal and official priorities on my home page is just great.

Google Apps to me is building up to be a true Web Platform for application development. It is very ironic to me that we in IT consulting keeping on talking to Enterprises about the strategies to implement SOA and forget to mention about how to leverage existing open SOA platforms like Google Apps.

This leads me to think that the next big thing for software applications is going to be- "Googify" the Applications. As the Google platform becomes more established you will see vendors that comply to google apis and the enable there application for the google portlets.

You already see IBM Websphere support the google gadgets in their platform and several vendors like salesforce.com are already Googifying there applications.

Google Apps and Openoffice

I am a very avid user of Google Apps. (NASDAQ:GOOG) I like it a lot. The Style I have always used Google Spreadsheets and documents is that I create the first version of my document(in excel or word) on my laptop and then upload it to google apps. Google is pretty good at keeping the original Excel or Word as intended. The ongoing maintainence of the document and sharing with other users is what I use google for.

Now will my style of functioning change when lets say Google adds more features to its application. I think probably not. The inherent latency in network to switch between tabs , data entry etc will always remain. Frankly when I am creating the baseline document I have a lot keyboard activity and since the document is in design stage I keep on iterating over how the document shoud be made. With the high keyboard activity in the early stages of document creation I have found that Google spreadsheet and documents to be limiting me and annoying from a response time standpoint.

So , where does open office(NASDAQ:SUNW) fit in ?

Well to have a viable alternative to Microsoft (MSFT) , google needs to understand that it needs to have desktop option. If it does not MSFT will be fast to catch up on the webification of office and it will take over google's initial gains.

The viable option at this time is open office. While there is already an alliance between SUN and Google in place , I am not sure if it has led to anything tangible.

Unless there is intigration between Google Apps and openoffice at the levels of feature intrigration, distribution intigration and messaging the alliance will not be successful.

Job Trend Leader's

Here is an interesting analysis of job trends for three major Rules Engines for Last year. (this is a analyis of jobs posted on internet with the keywords mentioned in the charts - source is indeed.com)

Looking at the charts it seems like Pega is gaining marketshare overall in the job market and ILOG is losing. It is quite sad that ILOG does not publish its numbers in comparision to BPMS vendors , while it does keep on claiming that it is 800 pound gorilla in the BRMS space.

Note that the BRMS space itself might be 5 by 5 square foot space. After 20 years of effort and 250 ISV's its revenue is 100Million only.No wonder its market cap is only a tiny fraction of that of its customers.

I will publish a post in the coming weeks highligthing the problems with ILOG and its business model Look out for it.



A few other charts of interest.

The Java technology chart is not surprising to me. Spring is the clearly the choice for application development and I am not suprised at the trendlines. The steady decline of EJB's and the steady rise of hibernate are also not surprising.


The Chart of particular interest to me is the GWT chart. Note the sudden burst in job postings for GWT in Jan 2007. This is a technology to look out for.I will not be surprised if GWT takes over struts in an years times.

Also note a comparision of salary levels of various skills

java $76,000
.NET $67,000
GWT $78,000
Spring framework $79,000
hibernate $80,000
jboss $76,000

View Larger Salary Graph