Denis’ Blog

I will give a presentation June, 12th, on Saas, on demand and open source at SIgestion 2008, a big trade show dedicated to Business & IT. Feel free to join, Saas & Open Source, that’s pretty hot topics nowadays. BTW, thanks to some of my readers for the opportunity .

Google today announced the beta (for 10.000 users) of their hosting services. If you are one of the happy few (for now), you can host you Python application for…well..nothing… You can store your data through a Python API . You have 500MB of disk storage, 10GB incoming /10 Gb outgoing bandwidth per day, 200 million megacycles of CPU per day and 2,000 emails per day. Ouch. That’s pretty cool.

Ok. You will argue that your are not using Python. First answer: maybe you should :-). Another one is: Google will support other platforms.

The service is less sexy that Amazon EC2 that provides a real virtualization platform. But Google is adding another brick in the SaaS/on demand space. Pretty exciting.

Google today announced that Google Docs, the Web based word processor of Google, will go off line in the coming weeks

This is a long awaited news. Security and off line usage are two things that prevent Google Apps to go mainstream in business. Security is now managed with Google APIs that enable full integration with corporation Identity Management solution (especially SAML based). In a few weeks, you will be able to use Google word processor in the train, in the plane…well..anywhere…

Add on top of that that Firefox 3, the next release of Firefox due to June, will integrate off line mode, probably compatible with Google Gears, the Google off line engine (based on open source database SQlite), and you have a great view of what is coming. The great war.