• Cloud Computing Thought Leadership

 

Google Cloud Computing Review

Google Apps [SaaS] and Google App Engine [PaaS]
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"The most interesting aspect of the cloud
isn't the cost. It's the pace of innovation"
-- Rajen Sheth, inventor of Google Apps
and current senior product manager

Google is a dominant player in office applications with Google Apps and add-on services for web sites; Google Maps, enterprise search solutions, analytics, product search and keyword advertising. Google also offers Postini for anti-virus and anti-spam email filtering, plus email archival. Postini's security filtering saves significant storage space. Postini can be enabled with non-Google enterprise email products.

Google Apps provides a lower-cost managed on-demand alternative to enterprise email, calendaring and document collaboration. For many companies this is considerably cheaper, far less labor-intensive and provides similar functionality to an in-house solution. Google claims more than 2 million businesses use Google Apps. Google Apps has a 99.9% uptime guarantee - about nine hours of downtime a year.

Competitors against Google Apps include Microsoft Web Apps, IBM Lotus Office, and Zoho.
Computerworld has an excellent detailed comparison of Google, Microsoft and Zoho.

In addition, companies are migrating to Google Apps from Microsoft and IBM because of storage limitations, performance issues, ease-of-use, and costs. For example, where Microsoft offers storage inbox loads in the megabytes, Google Apps offers 25 gigabytes per inbox for each worker. Upgrading Microsoft storage is expensive. Other migrated companies note that it is easier to organize conversations in Google Apps.

Google App Engine is a Platform as a Service, with all of their add-on web services as a base. Developed applications can only run only in the Java environment or the Python environment. This is worth watching, but is not yet a complete PaaS ecosystem such as Force.

According to InfoWorld, Google is currently working on getting its services certified to the government's Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) standards.

However, most importantly, as Thomas Claburn of Information Week notes, Google leads the cloud computing space in "sense of humor."

>> Consider Google CEO Eric Schmidt's blog post announcing that Google has changed its name to Topeka, in honor of Topeka, Kansas' name change to Google in an effort to become a test site for the company's ultrafast broadband network.

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