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First force.com; now Google App Engine – VMware spreads Spring across clouds
Friday, May 28, 2010 by Neil Ward-Dutton
I was (very slowly) getting wound up to splurge an in-depth post on Google’s partnership with VMware around the Google App Engine, but then I read William Vambenepe’s blog: From VMWare + SalesForce.com (VMForce) to VMWare + Google: VMWare’s PaaS milestones.
I think he’s done a lot of the work for me…
What I will do is build on one of William’s key points:
“These VMWare+Salesforce and VMWare+Google announcements are also interesting for what is NOT there. Isn’t it interesting that the companies that VMWare enables with a PaaS platform are those which… already have a PaaS platform? What we haven’t seen is VMWare enabling a mid-tier telco to become a PaaS provider. Someone who has power, servers and wires and wants to become a Cloud provider. VMWare is just starting to sell them an IaaS platform (vCloud) and cannot provide them with a turnkey PaaS platform yet by lack of application services (IDM, storage…) and of a comprehensive (i.e. not just virtualization) management platform.”
The value that VMware’s providing in both the force.com and Google App Engine cases is that it’s layering the Spring programming model – a very popular and well-used programming model – on top of existing platforms that lacked programming models that were slap-the-forehead compelling for mainstream app developers.
At the moment VMware has an IaaS foundation, as William says, and it also has the programming model. With RabbitMQ and Gemstone now part of the mix too, it’s in a position to start filling out the platform-layer services that developers are interested in. But even without those, VMware’s Spring complements force.com and GAE very nicely: they provide the public infrastructure and sets of interesting platform services; Spring provides a programming model that 2 million or so Java developers are familiar with.
It’s a sweet strategy that differentiates nicely from Microsoft (“open, multi-Cloud”); and everyone else (“it works across publicly-hosted and on-premise infrastructure”). I’m very interested to see what VMware does next.
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