For many VARs, cloud-based computing is a worrisome prospect.

The notion of functions served up direct to users from a vendor-owned-and-operated cloud poses a huge disintermediation threat to partners, as Richard Warren, of North Carolina Technologies told SearchITChannel.com, earlier this week.

 But the cloud vendors still need to prove themselves able to fully compete in a world where 99.9% of users need remote or offline capabilities. They need to work on their data and apps even if they’re not (gasp) connected to the Web.

Google execs say they will prove their technology worthy of the enterprise, blazing the trail with the Google Appliance. Google Gears is starting to bring offline capability to the company’s consumer and business services — Google Reader is “Gears enabled” as is Google Docs. (The spreadsheet and presentations so far  support just view-only offline access.) Read more »

WiMax is having a rough life — and this week epitomizes that.

The wireless protocol for broadband access — known in long form as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access — started off the week on a high note. On Monday, six tech heavy hitters, including Cisco Systems, Samsung Electronics, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Sprint and Clearwire formed the Open Patent Alliance.

Read more »

Google has said it wants developers to write apps to run in its “cloud.” Now, on the eve of the Google I/O conference, it disclosed how it will charge developers for the use of its server- and storage-farms and related infrastructure.

Developers can use Google App Engine free for up to 500MB of storage and enough CPU cycles to power five million page views per month. Google says 150,000 developers have already signed up.

Above and beyond the 500MB, five-million-page-view cut off, Google will charge ten cents to 12 cents per additional core CPU hour; 15 cents to 18 cents per GB storage; 11 cents to 13 cents per GB of outgoing bandwidth; and 9 cents to 11 cents per GB of incoming bandwidth.

That might sound confusing, but the race is on among vendors to lure developers into their own ecosystem with a pay-as-you-go model. eBay, Amazon.com, Google are among the Web 2.0 giants vying for developers’ attention. Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to balance its existing .Net development dominance in the on-premise software world with a more Web-savvy Live efforts.

For its part, Google will also soon furnish the new Google Web Tookit 1.5 as well as two new APIs. The first API promises to enable developers to scale, rotate, and crop images on the server. The second, a memcache API , a high-performance caching layer to speed up page rendering.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

A new version of the Google Web Toolkit (Gwit to Google insiders), promises full support for the latest Java language as well as faster-running apps at the end of the process.

GWT 1.5 will be formally introduced by Google’s top engineer Vic Gundotra Wednesday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco and be available for download within days.
“The biggest news is the Java 5 language support. Java itself has evolved a lot in the last few yeas and GWT 1.5 supports those new language features including the more modern syntax, generics and enumerated types,” said Google engineering manager Bruce Johnson.
As before, the goal of GWT is to make it easier for developers to create JavaScript code that can run on a wide variety of devices.

Johnson said early testers report better application performance. “Additional compiler optimizations in 1.5 result in noticeable application performance improvement,’ Johnson claimed.
Alex Moffat , engineering manager at Lombardi, Austin, Texas, is fully aboard. “The big benefit in 1.5, he says, is the support for all the new Java 5 syntax improvements. “They’ve added support for generics so you can write code that gives the compiler more information so you can catch more errors at compile time. You can now avoid a whole class of mistakes,” Moffat said.
Much of Lombardi’s Blueprint document discovery tool’s front end was written in GWT while the backend is all Java.

“If you are a Java shop, you’d have to be an idiot not to use GWT for the Web front end these days,” Moffat said. Non Java (i.e. .Net) shops would have to acquire Java expertise before venturing in.

With GWT, Google is making a play for business developers. Companies like Queplix, Contact Office, DoubleCheck LLC and Lombardi Software all use the current GWT 1.4 to develop applications ranging from customer care to business process management. 

This year Google  is even charging conference admission fee for the first time,  apparently trying to weed out non-serious programmers.  

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

All the papers are reporting that epic green mailer Carl Icahn is forging ahead with plans to nominate a clean slate of Yahoo board members. The goal is to force the company back to the bargaining table with Microsoft and eventually into Microsoft itself.

The deadline for board nominations is Thursday.

Icahn apparently thinks Microsoft is still jonesing for Yahoo, although it’s unclear to others whether Microsoft’s rejection of a deal is final.

When the Microhoo talks calmed down a couple of long-time Microsoft resellers said it was time for the company to reevaluate its priorities.

Microsoft’s consumer push and it’s growing cloud computing/SaaS fever have distracted the company from core businesses, they say.

“Microsoft has been spread miles thin,” said one long time partner who specializes in database and business intelligence work. “They have hurt themselves on Vista and business apps while they’ve been chasing Google,” he noted.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

PayPal, the online payment power, wants developers to integrate its payment system into more websites.

And it’s going to show them love at the upcoming EBay Developers Conference in Chicago, says Glenn Lim, head of PayPal’s Developer Network. EBay bought PayPal in 2003.

According to company stats, website developers have a big say in what payment system gets tied into an e-commerce site. In 45% of the cases, a developer actually makes that decision and in another 44%, the developer influences that decision. No wonder PayPal likes developers.

“Payment processing is a relatively small part of the website development process but it’s a really important part,” Lim joked. Apparently people like to get paid. Shocker.

One in four websites already accept PayPal, although many offer alternative Visa, BillMeLater or other payment systems as well, Lim said, And, perhaps most ominously for PayPal, Google is making noises about its own Google Checkout

Given that the guts of a payment system– the transaction handling and security –have to be baked in, it might seem that developers can’t do much in terms of customization. But you’d be surprised, Lim said. The core payment system is really locked down but through open APIs you can develop hooks into QuickBooks so you can pull transactions into QuickBooks or hooks into TurboTax or Excel for inventory monitoring or other purposes.

Will Blanchard, owner of New York -based Lambcast Ltd., makes his living by knowing all about payment systems. With most PayPal alternatives the website would have to get a merchant account, a business license or a line of credit and many people don’t have the proper credit for that. With PayPal, you can set up using an email address and a regular bank account, Blanchard said.

PayPal provides a simple front end to its services but more important are the backend web services and programmable interfaces, Blanchard said. PayPal makes it “drop-dead easy” to add payment options to sites and it also takes care of such worrisome details as fraud detection. Things no developer really wants to worry about.

One Lambcast product lets content creators sell their wares using email or from their blog or other channel. “If you author an ebook and want to sell it for $10 from your blog, we create a new zip format with PayPal embedded in it. Our toolset lets you zip up your ebook at a price and then distribute it however you want,”  Blanchard said.

It’s also more flexible than Google Checkout in that you can split the payments in the case of an ebook or other content with multiple authors. That can be done with Amazon’s FPS system as well, although Amazon supports fewer authors than PayPal.

To be clear, Lambcast works with all of the above options. Face it: If you want to sell stuff online, you need to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy the way they want to buy.

Another PayPal plus Lim cites is that at any given moment, $3 billion is sitting in PayPal accounts and that trove turns over every two weeks.

Not to reiterate the obvious, but if  you’re an online merchant, you want to make it as easy as possible for customers to spend that money with you and not the other guy.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

After reading about a gagillion articles on the Microhoo meltdown, the big mystery remains. (The only more popular topic in my household is the Roger Clemens death spiral, but it’s a close call.)

Is Steve Ballmer a diabolical genius who pushed Yahoo away only to end up getting it in the end? For less dough? Don’t kid yourself: That could still happen.

Proponents of this theory cite how BEA Systems crawled back to Oracle in the end. Although not for appreciably less money than Oracle was offering

Or did Ballmer waver, Hamlet like, and merely end up looking foolish?

One Microsoft insider put it this way: If you talk about an unsolicited bid (which Ballmer did) and hint about a hostile takeover (which Ballmer did) you’d better be prepared to go for the gusto (to quote the great Ballmer himself). And that means if the difference between you and them is a measly couple of dollars among the tens of billions already on the table, then GO FOR THE GUSTO!

But, face it: As for looking foolish, Steve B. may have some egg on his face, but Jerry Yang got the whole omelet. It stretches credulity to think that Yang did not KNOW the offer had been raised to $33 as has been reported. And institutional shareholders are out for blood. Yang will probably spend what’s left of his reign in full damage control mode.

In any case, as a former Microsoft exec said the other day: The only winner here is (guess who?)

“Google.”

“You’ve got the number 2 and 3 search guys battling it out tooth and nail and Google gets to sail along,” he said. (As a Microsoft shareholder, btw, he is not happy about this.)

Added bonus for Google: It gets to play the role of white knight to its number one rival and can act as savior to the whole Silicon Valley culture which has been dying to knock Microsoft off its perch.

So, maybe Google is the new Microsoft. I don’t throw that phrase around lightly seeing as how some remember when Borland was going to be the new Microsoft. Didn’t happen.

It’s not that Google has more money than … well, more money than Microsoft (which it might); it’s that Google is now blessed with a  rivals who are obsessed with beating it at all costs, that those rivals now end up with omelets on their faces.

Microsoft’s worst nightmare is not that it is the new IBM. It is that it may become the new Lotus.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Microsoft has abandoned its hard-fought — and expensive — bid to buy Yahoo.

A post to the company’s website Saturday includes a letter from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to his counterpart at Yahoo: Jerry Yang.

For some, this is a sign of sanity. Last week Microsoft raised its offer to $33 per share from $31. But Yang, held out for more. That last bit of intransigence may have given Ballmer & Co. what they needed: A good reason to walk away.

In his letter, Ballmer said taking the battle to Yahoo shareholders would have made it hard for a combined company to retain Yahoo technologists and engineers. The Wall Street Journal online reported that just hours earlier Ballmer and platform & services division president Kevin Johnson met with Yang and Yahoo co-founder David Filo in Seattle. Yahoo dropped its price to $37 per share, but Microsoft wouldn’t budge above $33.

While Microsoft’s willingness to spend more than $45 billion on Yahoo proved, to some, the company was bound-and determined to get relevant in the ad and search business. To others it was a huge distraction that would have resulted in a huge overlap in staffing and R&D. They feared massive layoffs and period of uncertainty while the convergence was worked out. Blogger Mini Microsoft, who had railed against the deal for some time, is already celebrating.  ”Hot damn and Yahoo!,” he wrote

Some Microsoft partners felt that the purchase attempt kept the company from concentrating on core efforts  that it can ill afford to screw up. (Office and Windows anyone?). They maintained the company should use its own in-house smarts to negotiate the road to software-as-a-service rather than spend $50 billion on Yahoo.

True, Yahoo would have brought some interesting stuff to the table even besides its successful portal. But how long has Microsoft been boasting about all the billions it’s been spending in R&D? Face it, many of us have been underwhelmed with the results thus far. So now would be a good time to wow the world with Microsoft’s home-grown tech, no?

In his letter to Yang, Ballmer still defended the purchase idea as the best option for both parties, “but clearly a deal is not to be.” (Update: Yahoo’s response here.)

That may very well be the best thing that’s happened to Microsoft in a long time — no disrespect to Yahoo.

The key now will be for Microsoft to focus on its own priorities — and maybe re-think whether fighting Google should remain job one.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

If you’re an ISV in the era of Saas vs. on-premise delivery models, the stack question has never been bigger.

If you’re going the on-premises route for your applications you must weigh the whole Java/Eclipse vs. .Net/Windows issue. If you’re going to SaaS, there are SaaS-based alternatives including Salesforce.com’s heavily touted environment to be considered.

Narinder Singh, founder of Appirio, says it’s cheaper and less risky to use someone else’s already-built-and-tested services stack to build and field your own software services. He’s cast his lot with Salesforce.com and Google toward that end. Singh was a featured speaker on Salesforce.com’s recent ‘Tour de force’ road show, so his preference is understandable.

At the Boston event last week,  Singh said Appirio saved $300,000 to $500,000 last year in IT costs alone by using Salesforce.com  (and Google infrastructure) as a foundation. It’s not coincidental that Appirio’s services–a CRM dashboard, calendar synchronization, online storage, are for Salesforce.com and Google universes.

The company, now up to 60 employees from ten or 15 a few years ago, uses exactly zero servers for development. It has no servers at all. Singh estimates that the company’s entire IT spend (not including laptops) is in the “hundreds of dollars per year per user.” That includes $50 per user per year for Google apps, $40 per user per year for the Salesforce.com platform license. Oh, and “we give everyone Microsoft Office” because they have to work with outsiders. So that’s probalby the biggest chunk of change outside the laptop. Appirio uses its own internal builds for recruiting, HR at very low cost compared to what he said could be $6,000 to $12,000 per user if SAP were used. (Singh used to be with SAP).

So Appirio gets all that foundational stuff and Salesforce.com doesn’t even get a cut of the action on Appirio’s sales. Hmm. Guess the upside for Salesforce.com is platform credibility and more application choices in its stable.

But Singh also says partners on Salesforce.com side of the fence can win deals by saving corporate customers significant money. He cited one unnamed Midwestern company that evaluated a Microsoft Dynamics on premises financial solution and a Salesforce.com competitor for about 1,000 users. The Microsoft software and services would have been over $4 million. The winning Salesforce.com/Appirio deal came in at between $1.2 and $1.5 million — roughly a third the cost.

The burning question then becomes whether that’s enough money for a services partner. “It’s enough for us to make money. It’s not clear whether it’s enough for Accenture,” Singh said. Accenture is a large services partner often aligned with Microsoft.

Another featured Salesforce.com partner paints a more nuanced picture because the ISV, Coda Financials, is both a Microsoft Gold ISV partner and a fairly new Salesforce.com partner. It’s upcoming on-demand financial services software, coda2go, build on Salesforce.com, will launch in June.

The speed of development was fairly dizzying using Salesforce.com, said Coda CTO Jeremy Roche. “From the minute we committed [to building the app services]  to cutting the actual application took three weeks. Now Coda’s been writing finance systems for 30 years so we know what we’re trying to do in terms of business requirements, but that’s still pretty fast.”

There was some retraining for developers in Apex vs. Java although even that learning curve was short because Salesforce.com’s Apex supports the Eclipse IDE which most of its developers already know.

Coda will continue to work with Microsoft for its on-premises implementations. But as a point of comparison, the company runs something like 356 servers for development of its Microsoft-based on-premise financial software compared to no servers for Salesforce.com.

Of course, with its mesh strategy, Microsoft will no doubt come up with a development platform for SaaS rather than the ad hoc toolsets it now offers, but no one expects deliverables any time soon.

Coda2go users will need a Salesforce.com license or Coda will OEM with Salesforce.com but again, Salesforce.com doesn’t get a piece of each sale.

Roche says the mixed stack mirrors his customer base. Some businesses are “actively moving to on demand. Some aren’t.” For companies wanting to deploy a a mix of both models, Coda will supply a connector to link on-premise and on-demand iterations.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

It’s Sunday and it appears that Yahoo has let Microsoft’s “take our offer or else” ultimatum pass without action.

By now everyone knows that those at the top of Microsoft are obsessed with Google. What’s unclear is if that power structure will be able to do to that market dominator what a Microsoft was able to do years ago to previous rivals: Companies like Lotus, Novell, and Netscape.

Maybe not. With all respect to Steve Ballmer, Ray Ozzie, et al., Microsoft is exhibiting some of the same behaviors that led to the demise of its previous rivals. Namely, they appear obsessed with a competitor to such an extent that they may be missing other opportunities.

Novell owned the file-and-print then network operating system business. It built the best partner channel in technology. But Ray Noorda became obsessed with Bill Gates et al. So much so that Novell management took its eye of the prize. One could argue the same affliction affected Lotus’ Jim Manzi. Excel chipped away at 1-2-3 dominance As for Netscape, well; Microsoft spent billions building its own browser then gave it away. Bye bye Netscape.

Now Microsoft is focused on Google’s Internet search and ad business, but after many years and multiple billions it has thus far been unable to make itself credible. The Yahoo bid convinces some that it’s given up on fighting Google with its own technology and resources.

You have to wonder if the Google obsession has kept Microsoft from executing well both on its cash cows (Vista, Office 2007 etc.) and in new arenas beyond Web search etc.

So an interesting question is whether Steve Ballmer is the new Ray Noorda?

You tell me. Post comment below or send email to bdarrow@techtarget.com.