Why Google Apps is better than IBM LotusLive

We at CloudGlow have experience with both Google Apps and IBM LotusLive as an office application platform. In our view, Google Apps is a fundamentally better product suite. Here are the reasons based on our experience:

• Google Apps has far superior runtime performance (in fact in our view, even most desktop applications appear sluggish compared to Google AJAX)
• Richer functionality and great collaboration tools
• Very well designed and thought through GData based API access
• Availability of a zero cost option for small guys (they even call it the standard edition!)
• This gives Google a huge advantage... its like the world is testing its software and scalability for free - Google is way smarter than you think when it offers something for free :)
• Integration with Single Sign On and external authentication schemes via SAML
• External mechanisms to populate Google Apps documents (e.g. filling in spreadsheets via Web Forms)
• Superior domain control capability and Admin panel
• Developer friendly community and online forums

IBM LotusLive - first experience

I recently tried out IBM LotusLive. I was very excited that IBM had an offering in the "cloud apps" arena, that my company - CloudGlow - specializes in. After logging in, I was hoping to be pleasantly surprised, but I actually found that LotusLive has very minimal functionality as of my testing. Given that Google has set a certain bar on functionality and performance, I was surprised that LotusLive is not even attempting to exceed the capabilities of Google Apps. The service itself seems to be all prepared for a small/medium business launch. With IBM behind it, of course, we can expect the service to get better over time. For now it seems like Google does not have to worry about it. May be it is just my view about Google Apps, but I just love it and feel that it is pure performance and great functionality (of course, it is not as extensive as Microsoft Office desktop version). It is really ready for prime time. Lets see where IBM takes their offering... the cloud apps world is looking forward to it.

Twilio - Google App Engine

I have been spending time with Twilio and hosting my server side code on Google App Engine. I must agree that Twilio is one of the friendliest service I have used. In fact it is so simple, that I thought to myself... why did it take so long for someone to create such a fundamental telephony building block... especially when open source stuff like Asterisk has been around. I had issues debugging originally but was later able to debug the code on my local GAE development server. I will be blogging more with my specific experiences with Twilio but so far things have been really smooth. This post may sound more like an advertisement for Twilio (no, I do not work for Twilio), but I am really excited to be experimenting with this. More on this later...

Google App Engine Management and Monitoring API

Google App Engine provides a very basic high-level system status page. It gives a quick on-off view of which of the GAE services are running and which are not. I am wondering if Google has any plans to provide a more API based and fine grained access to some of the monitoring and management data or have they purposefully left that gap for third party developers to build something against it. Of course it is fairly straightforward to write a quick-and-dirty monitoring system by running things inside GAE and doing real-time reporting (such as running monitoring GAE cron jobs with a API/UI interface). Google can do a much better job at it of course, given the fact that they have a lot more real & physical (vs. interpreted/derived) monitoring data that they already must be capturing. Maybe they just didn't get to publishing it yet.

Google App Engine as a simple website hosting platform

When I first learnt about the Google App Engine infrastructure, it was clear to me that it was a solid application development platform. And I started playing with it with that viewpoint. Pretty soon it became clear that it is a simple but solid web site hosting platform as well. I say simple because as of today you can do a certain things, but not all (it is not as flexible as the Amazon EC2 platform - which is in my view more of a raw iron platform, offering extreme flexibility for legacy applications). In order to offer the high-level frictionless service provisioning and the abstractions and assumptions that go with it, Google App Engine is an extremely managed environment. And that is a good thing. So we at CloudGlow decided to do that precisely. CloudGlow.com uses Google App Engine as both an application hosting platform as well as to host the static website. Best of all, given owr low usage statistics we get all the high availability and Google power for free. I feel Amazon should offer a zero cost starter option for small guys, to let them build and test out. The benefits [to Amazon and the developer community] will surpass the incremental cost to Amazon, in my view anyway.