August 30, 2006
Google As Service Provider Trundles On...
Reported widely (this from the BBC is typical, and this from Information Week analyses the move in relation to Microsoft Live), Google are now hosting office like services for businesses: Google Apps for Your Domain (Gmail, Talk, Calendar and Page Creator at the mo, but presumably more to follow?).
And the offering is not just apps for businessy businesses, at that:
As you might expect, the Google monster has trundled on from from Outsourcing Email in Higher Education to providing the whole range of Google Apps for Education ...
Another interesting announcement that happened while I was away on holiday (darn it - I got an invite, but the beta is now closed...) was for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):
... a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon's proven computing environment.
(For a quick review, here's the Techcrunch take on EC2.)
Sun have been offering this sort of service with the Sun Grid Compute Utility for some time, but Amazon's move is another step towards providing a complete set of web app backend services.
Posted by ajh59 at August 30, 2006 06:27 PM