Duke-on-gae

As many ISVs and vendors of business applications have
subscribed this vendor strategy blog of Forrester, I’d like to share two important
announcement of this week with you. Both will make business applications in the
cloud more attractive and enable ISVs to reach more people with their cloud deployment.

The first one is around Salesforce.com’s mobile client for
the iPhone and Blackberry. Packaged as free Mobile Lite,
the client app is a version of the company's existing mobile program. It gives
mobile workers restricted read-only access to their salesforce.com account. Beyond
this, the free version allows users to update tasks and calendars. Unfortunately
third-party applications that might be deployed on force.com are not getting
mobile capabilities through the mobile client automatically. ISVs have to
create corresponding style sheets and have to enable their force.com objects
for mobile access manually. Although there is no direct benefit for existing third
party apps on this platform, the free option will drive significantly the mass
adoption of mobile access to the CRM system. This will finally generate much
more demand for mobile access to third-party apps. Be prepared for your
customer request in this direction.

The second interesting announcement comes from Google. The
vendor celebrated the first birthday of its App Engine this week at the
developer event Campfire One.  The engine is based on Python and
provides basic platform as a service capabilities. Much functionality is still missing
to be a grown-up PaaS environment compared with Forrester's
Platform-As-A-Service Reference Architecture.
However, the app engine is quite attractive to deploy scaled out deployments of
new web applications. Google is announcing now Java support of the App Engine! Acknowledging
the dominant java IDE Eclipse, Google announced also a Eclipse plugin to support the link between the App Engine and this major IDE. The Google App
Engine with Java support is available since April 7th for 10,000
interested developers as a preview. Potentially this is the next evolutionary
step in the history of Java Application Server.

I am curious to hear feedback from application vendors how
the migration from existing Java application into Google’s App Engine works.