But even though adoption has been slow, more and more applications are gradually getting Gears treatments.

Today Google announced that Gmail can now be taken offline with Google Gears, meaning that you can now read and reply to your Gmail messages while you’re disconnected from the interweb, and have all of the email synchronize when you’re back online again.  There are still some bits of functionality that aren’t available in an offline mode – like the calendar, for example – but it’s a great start and about time.

Google Reader has offered offline support through Gears for some time now, and so has Google Docs.  Wordpress, although not an application developed by Google, has featured gears support for some time now.

It’s exciting to see so many powerful and rich applications available for offline use with Gears.  This could be one of those little things that Microsoft hears about and gets them a little bit nervous about the long-term future.  It’s probably far too early to make predictions about how much further web applications will go in replacing traditional desktop applications – and certainly there will always be some applications that will probably never be practical as web applications, like Adobe Photoshop for example.  But traditional “knowledge worker” applications – office productivity applications – seem like prime targets to be replaced by rich web applications.  Reliable and usable offline versions will likely accelerate the pace of innovation in these types of applications, as having an offline version will likely speed up end user adoption.  In other words, I think we’re hitting an inflection point where Google may consider a heavier investment in engineering and development of these tools.  Plus, Microsoft is planning a full web interface of their Office suite with the Office 14 release.  This could be the start of a new software war: the offline office suite war.

But I could be wrong.  As I said, I overestimated how quickly Gears would be adopted in the first place.  So we’ll see, I suppose.  My money is on Google for now, though.

Well, it just so happens that Symantec announced the beginning of a beta program for their new bilkoid engine, dubbed GoEverywhere.  Symantec is positioning GoEverywhere as a SaaS web security proxy solution.  There aren’t many details posted yet on their beta site, but GoEverywhere looks like a giant single-sign on web proxy that allows customers to stitch together web applications from several locations and include SSO, dual factor security, etc.

This doesn’t look quite as strong as the solution that BEA had, AquaLogic Ensemble.  It looks like GoEverywhere relies on a bunch of IFRAMEs to stitch together multiple sites onto one page.  BEA AquaLogic Ensemble, now Oracle WebCenter Ensemble, can perform the same type of functionality, but does it without using IFRAMEs.

It’s interesting to see Symantec position GoEverywhere as a security tool first and foremost.  This makes sense for Symantec, since their reputation is web security tools.  It’s also ironic, I think, that most Ensemble customers were also interested in Ensemble for the same reasons: web security (and policies, single sign-on, etc.), and less so about mashing up pieces of disparate applications.  Does this mean that mashups are really dead?  If so, long live the bilkoid.

According to the company press release:

LotusLive is designed to help companies work smarter by making it easy for them to connect and work together — with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. LotusLive’s online services give businesses of all sizes access to Lotus’ rich collaboration tools without requiring an up-front investment in IT support resources or infrastructure.

What’s most interesting about this news is IBM’s plans to partner with several key SaaS vendors:

• LinkedIn will provide LotusLive with searchable contact information.
• Salesforce.com will integrate LotusLive services within its CRM application.
• Skype announced plans to integrate voice and video into LotusLive.

Right now only LotusLive Meetings (Lotus Sametime) and LotusLive Events along with the hosted Notes application appear to be available for purchase, with the other solutions still showing up as being in beta.  I wasn’t able to find details on when IBM plans to make the additional functionality available.

The dashboard page for the collaboration component looks a lot like what you might expect from a "web2.0” site, and is actually pretty slick looking.

Even without the details about when it’ll be available, it’s exciting news from IBM, and it stacks up nicely against Microsoft and their plans for more SaaS offerings with the upcoming Office 14 release, as well as Google’s recent push to start selling Google Apps through their recently announced reseller program.

More details at LotusLive.com, full LotusLive press release at IBM.

I started thinking about this more today, and I came up with what I believe is a more or less accurate picture of the high-level areas of social computing, or for lack of a better term, the community platform:

So, what’s in a community platform?  Let’s take a look…

Knowledge Management

• Sharing: the ability for users to upload, tag and rate content, the ability to broadcast what you are working on (activity feeds)
• Discover: the ability for users to browse content that others have submitted or rated highly, or the ability to search content

Social Computing

• Discuss: user-driven blogging, and SMS-integrated micro-blogging, along with email-integrated threaded discussion boards
• Collaborate: the ability to check-in and check-out shared documents (usually the common office formats: DOC, XLS, PDF), and keep a revision history, as well as simple and fast rich text editing (wikis)

Social Networking

• Profile (Reputation): a representation of who you are, what you know, and what you have contributed to the community
• Network: the ability to connect with other users in the system, create private working groups, and maintain different scopes of visibility into the activities of others

The funny thing about this picture is that these high-level concepts are the same ones that have been around for many years.  For example, a typical bulletin board system from the early 1990s would’ve offered these same kinds of features.  Sharing?  Sure – you could upload and download files.  Remember the ZModem protocol, anyone?  How about Discover?  Yep, search was a part of the best file sharing parts of a BBS.  How about Discussions or Collaboration?  Well of course, and there was even FIDOnet.  You could check-in documents into the file repo and keep track of versions.  Sure, it was all over a terminal window, but it was still a community platform.  What about profile (reputation) and networking?  Well, those pieces weren’t quite as solid.  Bulletin board systems had some notion of a profile, but you really couldn’t add people that you were "friends" with, and there was no notion that your profile was hidden to everyone except your friends.

I would say it is a bit unlikely that they decided to purchase either due to the downturn. I believe both companies would spend a long time in doing due diligence before announcing that they would be looking to acquire any company. This would mean the idea most likely would have germinated pre-financial crisis. Unless the two companies had the foresight that the rest of the world seemed to lack.

I completely agree with this.  Although I do wonder about the timing involved of the Oracle-Haley acquisition.  SAP purchased Yasu, another BRMS vendor, back in 2007, long before IBM announced its purchase of ILOG.  My suspicion is that Oracle didn’t really care until they heard about the IBM-ILOG purchase, and at that point fast-tracked a replacement for their own under-resourced BRMS offering.

They probably realized at that point that two of their products were at risk of losing a strategic advantage: their BPM offering and WebLogic.  If IBM is able to integrate ILOG into their WebSphere J2EE platform, it would strengthen both their BPM solution and their WebSphere offering.

And then there’s the whole issue of how long it’ll likely take to ever fully integrate Haley and ILOG into Oracle and IBM respectively.  Although the company entities can be integrated quickly, the work to do real software integration may take years.

Again, this is all my own personal speculation and conjecture, but I still find Oracle’s public explanation a little curious.

Team Hosted combines the enterprise features of Confluence with the convenience and affordability of SaaS. It lets users:

• Edit pages using Microsoft Word
• Utilize free third-party plugins like EditGrid spreadsheets and Gliffy diagrams
• Attach and share documents, photos and video (up to 10GB)
• Start immediately. No installation or payment is required

You can get a free 30 day trial of Atlassian Confluence, which might be a good way to test drive it before you decide to buy into a monthly Enterprise hosted or on-site license for Confluence.

In order to achieve that, Google wants to hire you to become a reseller of their business applications, and set up small and medium businesses with Google’s SaaS offerings.  The premise is simple and brilliant, and it’s the type of thing that Microsoft has been doing for years with their Microsoft Certified Service Professional program.

Sounds great, so what’s the catch?

The one “gotcha” part of it is that it’s up to you to bill the customer for your services and time, and Google in turn will bill you directly.  But the bonus for you as a reseller is that you can start building a value-add proposition for customers: they trust you to convert them to a lower-cost SaaS offering (or deploy productivity applications in their environment for the first time), and in turn the company continues working with you as a trusted IT services vendor and architect.

Perhaps one possible criticism of Google’s plan to create a reseller program: it seems to be violating one of the principles of the evolving SaaS market.  Specifically, SaaS offerings should be so simple and easy to use that any employee of a company with little to no IT experience should be able to purchase any software-as-a-service direct from a vendor’s website and start using the product immediately.  This perhaps shows a sign of weakness in how easy it is at the moment for companies to transition to Google as a SaaS provider.  But, that criticism aside, Google’s reseller program seems to be a smart move.

Google plans to weed out the flakey service providers by testing your IT skills before authorizing you to be a part of their reseller program.  It’s then up to you to go out and drum up business, and if you aren’t signing up clients, it’s no loss to Google.  Overall it seems like a win-win for Google: they are effectively building an extremely cost efficient sales force (which is almost free to them, aside from the training materials and reseller testing), and these resellers don’t actually make any money from Google.  It’s almost like all of those power eBay sellers who make a living selling their products on eBay.

Back in July of 2008, IBM announced their plans to acquire ILOG.  Most of the buzz was around IBM integrating ILOG, a Java business rules engine, into their IBM WebSphere J2EE application server.  It seemed like maybe IBM’s aim was to improve their BPM offering by extending BPM with a full blown BRMS engine.  That would allow for some hyper complex routing rules in BPM, and also strengthen IBM’s position against Oracle’s recently acquired BEA WebLogic Server (now Oracle WebLogic Server).

Around October of 2008, Oracle announced that they were planning to buy Haley.  Haley was originally a small US-based BRMS vendor, but was purchased by RuleBurst, an Australian company, back in November of 2007.

Oracle has said publicly that their intentions in buying Haley were to help develop software in a highly regulated financial market, and in fact InformationWeek speculated on that idea just yesterday.  They seem to be betting on the notion that the financial markets will become more regulated to prevent the kind of credit default swap madness that we’ve been hearing about over the last few months.

But I believe the real story is a tiny bit different, and it probably goes something like this:

• Oracle has long competed against IBM and SAP as a leader in business applications – in CRM, ERP, and other middleware categories
• The BPM (business process management) market was predicted to grow between 29 to 44% through 2011, for a total market size somewhere around $4 billion USD (according to Gartner, IDC and Forrester – source)
• Oracle had acquired a ton of middleware, an additional BPM engine (Fuego, later known as AquaLogic BPM), and a robust J2EE application server – in fact they ultimately dropped their own Oracle iAS J2EE server in favor of WebLogic Server
• Oracle’s primary intention in acquiring BEA was to both have less competition in the SOA/middleware market, but also to compete more strongly against IBM with a better J2EE platform
• IBM also has a J2EE application server, perhaps arguably the only one that stands in the way of total market domination for Oracle, as well as a BPM engine
• IBM wanted a larger share of the BPM market, so they bought ILOG with that intention, but also planned to put WebSphere ahead of WebLogic Server strategically
• Oracle decided to dump their own home grown rules engine in favor of Haley

The way it all works out, though, is really rather interesting.  Both vendors are now strategically in a healthy position to react to any need for complex software that can handle new and evolving financial regulations.  And it’s a good way to explain the decision to the market, even though it seems like the Haley acquisition may have actually been more of a response to IBM than to the possibility of a heavily regulated financial market. 

It should be interesting to see how this story continues to progress.

This is good news for Microsoft, considering that recent research form Forrester shows that services like Google’s Gmail cost 1/3 that of traditional on-site email solutions.  According to Forrester, it costs around $25.18 per month per user for on-site, hosted email vs. $8.47 for Gmail to operate.

Email is one of those services that I still say is easier to convert to SaaS than others.  It’s one I’d really love to see more companies adopt.

Also of interest: cloud computing is expected to be less frequently used, with only 10% of developers using cloud services (although many of the SaaS vendors may ultimately leverage cloud computing vendors on the back-end to provide scalability, so who knows).  Development of RIA, or rich internet applications, was also expected by 68% of the respondents.

I still think this isn’t too surprising: cloud computing as a concept is useful for folks that want to take the halfway step.  It’s great if you don’t want to own datacenter maintenance, or if you want to deploy a piece of enterprise software on a scalable infrastructure, but there are more upfront benefits in jumping into a SaaS solution right away rather than taking the cloud computing interim step.

Also, with so many varied definitions of RIA, and so many easy-to-use frameworks (Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, Sun JavaFX), it’s not surprising to see such a high percentage of respondents say they’ll be working on an RIA project.

[c/o InformationWeek]