Sobre el Costo de Oportunidad

Este ahorro se conoce como Costo de Oportunidad. Si bien en el presupuesto no se va a notar, en la realidad sí. Esto es lo que hay que aprender cuando se habla de fabricar autos caros en la Argentina o traerlos baratos desde Japón, Europa y Estados Unidos. En nuestro caso el mayor costo que pagamos por los autos caros y de peor tecnología no se encuentra reflejado en ningún balance, sin embargo, el costo es real y genera que como sociedad seamos más pobres. Algunos argumentan que si bien esto puede ser cierto, de aplicar esta medida se perderían puestos de trabajo locales. El tema es que justamente cuando se habla de más pobres significa que si trajéramos autos más baratos podríamos generar más empleo que el que ahora nos encontramos generando. Para que el que tenga dudas de esto puede darse una vuelta por Chile. Allí los autos son japoneses, tienen la última tecnología y ninguno se fabrica por manos chilenas. Sin embargo, ellos son mucho más ricos que nosotros (ver pbi per cápita de chile vs el de argentina)

Los argentinos contamos con políticos inteligentes

En nuestro país también hay gobernantes que están proponiendo el uso de Google Apps. Hay que dar a conocer que aquí también hay personas que trabajan bien y tienen ideas útiles y modernas. En este video se puede ver a Enrique Avogrado del Gob de la Ciudad de Bs As explicando la medida.

The answers varied from the clients initially being skeptical to use the SaaS based applications, to SaaS & PaaS becoming a norm within the next 5-10years. Now that SaaS has matured and with PaaS(Platform as a Service) becoming a reality they will rule the market within the next 5-10 years.

People love the value these products offer by giving a quick ROI.Also,most of them say that the desktops will be gradually replaced by easy to use Apps which will rule the roost within the next 5-10 years.

So,if you haven't tried SaaS ,why not try some cool Apps from the likes of Zoho Business Suite or Google Apps and you will realize what is in store for you.

Cheers,

Ramesh

bhandari.ramesh@pegasyssoft.com

www.pegasyssoft.com

There is no one-for-all sync solution if connecting

Total number

In August Eric Zeman from the InformationWeek reported the figure of 10 million users. Way up from the 1 million they claimed in April.

If both figures are correct, they supposedly grow by a couple of million a month so if the trend continues they must be around 15 million by now.

Education

Schools and universities get Google Apps (full service without ads) for free, and they did publish some numbers for this sector. In the end of July this year they claimed 1 million users, last month - already 2 million.

Enterprise Adoption

Back in April it was 1 million people from 3,000 businesses. In August CNN reported Google's claim to have more than 500,000 companies use at least one its programs. However, this includes free version, apps bundled with domain names (e.g. issued by name.com) and Postini customers (who just use the anti-spam filter - not the Google Apps suite.)

As far as the reports go none of Fortune 500 companies have embraced Google Apps in its entirety. Same CNN story says that "the largest Fortune 500 company to use Google Apps is Sanmina-SCI (SANM), an electronics manufacturing company that has 900 of its 45,000 employees using the full package of applications. Another paying customer is Valeo, a publicly-traded French automotive supplier."

Keep in mind by the way that even when they claim success at a particular account, it often turns out that the report is an exaggeration and it was simply a trial project - not the real transition. Back in June they claimed that they got Procter & Gamble. Which as we now know was just a trial and the company decided to stay with Microsoft later on.

Who is paying?

Great, so is there anyone actually paying for the service? Can you imagine a Fortune 500 company going with an ad-supported edition? I cannot.

The only customer reference which we have with a $ bill assigned is Washington, D.C.: "A year ago, Washington D.C. became the first U.S. city to use Google Apps when it paid $1.9 million for 38,000 accounts." (CNN)

Are there many customers like that?

Google Apps’ contribution to Google’s annual income was only $4 million in 2007.

Divide that by $50 per user per year fee and you will get just 80,000 yearly user subscriptions for 2007. OK, supposedly a lot of companies were joining mid-/late-2007 - so there were more paying users in 2007 (twice more? three times?)

Obviously extrapolating to 2008 is tough.

Did I miss anything?

Deciphering all these datapoints and trying to turn them into a comprehensive picture is tough: sometimes the numbers include Postini - sometimes they do not, sometimes they are talking only about business users - sometimes they would include consumers, and so on, and so forth.

Were there any other data points that I missed? Leave me a note!

Tags: Cloud Computing, Google, Google Apps, SaaS
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A short time ago in a data centre, far far away.....

All the big players are setting out their cloud pitches, Microsoft are set to make some big announcements at their Professional Developer Conference at the end of October and VMWare made their VDC-OS announcements at VMWorld a couple of weeks ago, Google have had their App Engine in beta for a while and Amazon AWS is pretty well established.

With this post I hope to give a quick overview of each, I'll freely admit I'm more knowledgeable on the VMWare/Microsoft offerings... and I stand to be corrected on any assumptions I've made on Google/AWS based on my web reading.

So, What's the difference between them...?

VMWare vCloud - infrastructure led play

VMWare come from the infrastructure space, to-date they have dominated the x86 virtualization market, they have some key strategic partnerships with storage and network vendors to deliver integrated solutions.

The VMWare VDC-OS pitch is about providing a flexible underlying architecture through servers, network and storage virtualisation. why? because making everything 'virtual' makes for quick reconfiguration - reallocating resource from one service to another is a configuration/allocation change rather than requiring an engineer visit (see my other post on this for more info)

because VMWare's pitch is infrastructure led it has a significant practical advantage in that it's essentially technology agnostic (as long as it's x86 based) you, or a service provider have the ability to build and maintain an automated birth-->death bare 'virtual metal' provisioning and lifecycle system for application servers/services as there is no longer a tight dependency for everything on physical hardware, cabling etc

There is no one size fits all product in this space so a bespoke solution based around a standard framework tool like Tivoli, SMS, etc. is typically required depending on organisational/service requirements.

No re-development is necessarily required to move your applications into a vCloud (hosted or internal) you just move your VMWare virtual machines to a different underlying VDC-OS infrastructure, or you use P2V, X2V tools like Platespin to migrate to a VDC-OS infrastructure.

In terms of limitations - apps can't necessarily scale horizontally (yet) as they are constrained by their traditional server based roots. The ability to add a 2nd node doesn't necessarily make your app scale - there are all kinds of issues around state, concurrency etc. that the application framework needs to manage.

VMWare are building frameworks to build scale-out provisioning tools - but this would only work for certain types of applications and is currently reactive unless you build some intelligence into the provisioning system.

Scott Lowe has a good round-up of VDC-OS information here & VMWare's official page is online here

Google AppEngine- pure app framework play

An application framework for you to develop your apps within - it provides a vastly parallel application and storage framework - excellent for developing large applications (i.e Google's bread & butter)

Disadvantage is it's a complete redevelopment of you applications into Google compatible code, services & frameworks. You are tied into Google services - you can't (as I understand it) take your developed applications elsewhere without significant re-development/porting.

The Google AppEngine blog is here

Microsoft Cloud Services Hosted Application stack & Infrastructure play

An interesting offering, they will technically have the ability to host .net applications from a shared hosting service, as well as integrating future versions of their traditional and well established office/productivity applications into their cloud platform; almost offering the subscription based/Software+Services model they've been mooting for a long time.

Given Microsoft's market current dominance, they are very well positioned to make this successful as large shops will be able to modify existing internal .net services and applications to leverage portions of their cloud offering.

With the future developments of Hyper-V Microsoft will be well positioned to offer an infrastructure driven equivalent of VMWare's VDC-OS proposition to service and support migration from existing dedicated Windows and Linux servers to an internal or externally hosted cloud type platform.

David Chou at Microsoft has a good post on Microsoft and clouds here

Amazon Web Services - established app framework with canned virtualization

the AWS platform provides a range of the same sort of functionality as Google AppEngine with SimpleDB,  SQS and S3 but with the recently announced ability to run Windows within their EC2 cloud makes for an interesting offering with the existing ability to pick & choose from Linux based virtual machine instances.

I believe EC2 makes heavy use of Xen under the hood; which I assume is how they are going to be delivering the Windows based services, EC2 also allows you to choose from a number of standard Linux virtual machine offerings (Amazon Machine Image, AMI).

This is an interesting offering, allowing you to develop your applications into their framework and possibly port or build your Linux/Windows application services into their managed EC2 service.

Same caveat applies though, your apps and virtual machines could be tied to the AWS framework - so you loose your portability without significant re-engineering. on the flip-side they do seem to have the best defined commercial and support models and have been well established for a while with the S3 service.

Amazon's AWS blog is available here

Conclusion

Microsoft & VMWare are best positioned to pick up businesses from the corporate's who will likely have a large existing investment in code and infrastructure but are looking to take advantage of reduced cost and complexity by hosting portions of their app/infrastructure with a service-provider.

Microsoft & VMWare offerings easily lend themselves to this internal/external cloud architecture as you can build your own internal cloud using their off-the-shelf technology, something that isn't possible with AWS or Google. This is likely to be the preferred model for most large businesses who need to retain ownership of data and certain systems for legal/compliance reasons.

leveraging virtualization and commercial X2V or X2X conversion tools will make transition between internal and external clouds simple and quick - which gives organisations a lot of flexibility to operate their systems in the most cost/load-effective manner as well as retain detailed control of the application/server infrastructure but freed up from the day-day hardware/capacity management roles.

AWS/Google are ideal for Web 2.0 ,start-ups and the SME sector where there is typically no existing or large code-base investment that would need to be leveraged. For a greenfield implementation these services offer low start-up cost and simple development tools to build applications that would be complicated & expensive to build if you had to worry about and develop supporting infrastructure without significant up-front capital backing.

AWS/Google are also great for people wanting to build applications that need to scale to lots of users, but without a deep understanding of the required underlying infrastructure, whilst this is appealing to corporate's  I think the cost of porting and data ownership/risk issues will be a blocker for a significant amount of time.

Google Apps are a good entry point for the SME/start-up sector and startups, and could well draw people into building AppEngine services as the business grows in size and complexity, so we may see a drift towards this over time. Microsoft have a competing model and could leverage their established brand to win over customers if they can make the entry point free/cheap and cross-platform compatible, lots of those SME/start-ups are using Mac's or Netbooks for example.

... the Mac version of Chrome will use a WebCore-rendered bitmap to pass between the browser and rendering processes. The strategy we use in Hypercube (and now Stainless) is far less ambitious, but a whole lot easier to do and, thus, available today for your downloading pleasure (for Leopard only, sorry).

Stainless home page

As with anything, the devil is in the details; and this article is too lightweight to give the whole picture. A more nuanced analysis and report of what these two people are talking about would point out that their caution is all about trust - and mostly rooted in the warning not to store data in the "cloud". Giving your data away to a third party is convenient, but is too likely to lead to long term grief; you have to trust that party to keep your data integral (backed up and accessible at all times), safe (good security from the outside), and secure (no access to your data from the inside, and no use of it for any purposes other than what you explicitly authorize). In truth, no existing web facility can claim to be better at this than keeping your own data on your own machines.

Richard Stallman is additionally making another point about cloud computing: as far as I understand him, it's okay for you to use the cloud to perform computations if you've installed your own software there, but not reasonable to trust a cloud computer that someone else can put software on. In the end, that means really that any cloud computer can't be trusted, even Amazon's EC2, since Amazon's emulator could be designed to allow them access to your running instance at any time. However, I'd guess that on a sliding scale of trust, their setup is more trustworthy than Google Apps (or Sun's Project Caroline) where you create applications which are written to their libraries and APIs, without knowing exactly how those are implemented (and how they're exposing your information to the world or to the application hosts). Google Apps is open source code, so you can run a version on your own computer; in this way, you could create your own cloud and trust it after auditing the code. However, you can't trust Google to be running a version which is the same as what you could run at home, so even having the source code is not sufficient for trust.

I realize this is a lot more subtle than what the linked-to article is expressing. But even if my analysis is wrong, I hope I've inspired you to go read the source material and draw your own conclusion!

After longing for product improvements at Yahoo; I decided that I'd not wait around any more - and finally ditched 'em. I don't complain much (not that you could tell from this blog) but my experience with Yahoo over the last few years have been bittersweet.

So - cya Yahoo!

Internet da Zero - uso di Google Apps per E-Mail e Documenti

Per poter cominciare ad utilizzare Internet senza problemi è opportuno puntare su servizi potenti ed affidabili come quelli forniti da Google con GMail e Google Documents il cui uso da base ad avanzato garantisce le migliori prestazioni attualmente possibili per un servizio di E-Mail e gestione documenti online.

Nella moderna visione di Internet 2.0 i dati e le applicazioni sono presenti e disponibili in rete, accessibili da qualunque postazione collegata ad Internet e svincolati dalla necessità di dover disporre del proprio computers e delle proprie applicazioni. Si trova tutto in rete ed è sufficente potervi accedere per poter utilizzare i propri servizi e dati online.

GMail, cosa fa di diverso e perchè lo fa meglio

I servizi E-Mail offerti dai tradizionali Providers come Alice, Tiscali, Libero, Fastweb non sono affidabili e flessibili come quelli offerti da Google con GMail e la prima cosa da fare è creare un proprio Account GMail indicando come indirizzo secondario quello offerto dal vostro provider e successivamente configurare la casella E-Mail fornita dal vostro provider per inoltrare i messaggi alla vostra casella GMail, in questa maniera continuerete a ricevere la posta senza dover controllare un'altra mailbox.

Data la vastità della sue funzioni effettuiamo presso il cliente una o più sessioni di training sull'uso di G-Mail ma possiamo riassumere brevemente le caratteristiche che rendono Gmail migliore e differente dagli altri servizi disponibili online:

• Account Google unico: con la vostra registrazione e Gmail avete creato il vostro Account Google che vi darà accesso con facilità a tutti i servizi Google come Reader, Calendar, Documenti, Mappe, Picasa Web e tanti altri che imparerete a conoscere
• Grande capienza e flessibilità: la vostra mailbox GMail ha una capacità di oltre 6 GIGA, tale da non doversi mai preoccupare se si riempie, al confronto la mailbox offerta da Fastweb è di soli 15 MB
• Ordina Messaggi in Conversazioni: GMail tiene insieme tutti i messaggi E-Mail relativi alla stessa discussione, sia quelli ricevuti che quelli inviati in maniera tale da farvi avere sempre sott'occhio lo svolgimento della discussione
• AntiSpam e Sicurezza: il filtro AntiSpam di GMail è senza dubbio efficacissimo anche se non si finisce mai di migliorare, ricordatevi di Segnalare come Spam i messaggi indesiderati che trovate in Posta in Arrivo, aiuterete GMail ad aggiornare i suoi filtri. Sicurezza: GMail usa il protocollo di sicurezza HTTPS durante tutta la sessione e segnala da quale posizione l'Account è stato aperto l'ultima volta. La vostra Mailbox Gmail funzionerà sempre in modalità sicura HTTPS (se selezionata) da dovunque effettuiate l'accesso.
• GMail sempre con Voi: è possibile consultare facilmente GMail dal vostro cellulare sia via Web attraverso la semplice e veloce versione Mobile di Gmail, sia attraverso l'Applicazione GMail da installare sul vostro cellulare
• Pubblicità discreta: a differenza di altri fornitori di servizi gratuiti che vi bombardano di offerte, GMail utlizza la pubblicità di AdSense che posiziona annunci pubblicitari contestuali ai testi dei vostri messaggi in maniera discreta e non invasiva

Google Documenti, creazione, pubblicazione e condivisione di documenti online

Il poter accedere online ai propri documenti, mandarli ad altri per revisione, condividerli in un gruppo di lavoro ed archiviarli in sicurezza è praticamente il sogno di tutti, con Google Documenti questi obiettivi possono essere raggiunti con semplicità ed a costo zero. Google Documenti consente di creare online documenti di testo, fogli di calcolo, presentazioni, perfettamente compatibili con Microsoft Office ed Open Office oltre a gestire la maggior parte dei formati di uso comune.

Google Documenti consente di creare il proprio Gruppo di lavoro condividendo ogni singolo documento in maniera diversa e rendendo anche disponibili i documenti per la sola visione all'esterno del gruppo. Gli usi a cui si presta Google Documenti sono i più vari dall'ambito professionale alla archiviazione e consultazione remota della propria documentazione personale.

Google Documenti consente anche di lavorare non collegati ad Internet e di sincronizzare i documenti presenti sul proprio computer al successivo accesso online, questo è possibile grazie e alle funzionalità di Google Gears..

Anche per Google Documenti effettuiamo specifiche sessioni di training presso i clienti per illustrare le potenzialità del servizio e consentire al cliente di padroneggiare con sicurezza il proprio archivio di documenti online. Naturalmente tutti i documenti creati o archiviati su Google Documenti possono risiedere sul proprio computer e possono essere modificati sul proprio computer e poi aggiornati online, ma quando vi abituerete a creare e modificare i documenti online lo troverete più semplice e comodo..

Anche Google Documenti è una applicazione molto potente che risolve moltissimi problemi che invece si incontrano utilizzando pacchetti software come Microsoft Office, la gestione e la condivisione online sono semplici ed a portata di tutti e l'utilità che si può ricavare da un servizio di questo è molto maggiore di quella che un utente medio possa immaginare a partire dalla sicurezza di avere anche le proprie bollette della luce salvate in una posizione sicura.

L'esperto digitale illustrerà al cliente come utilizzare Google Documents per archiviare online la propria documentazione, le proprie immagini e i propri files, come accedervi e come condividerli o inviarli. Anche il carteggio familiare può essere prezioso e va salvaguardato oltre che reso facilmente consultabile.

Nel prossimo post: Google Apps Professionale con Dominio

The move, which replaces the former student email package, offers gigabytes of email storage in a reliable and familiar email interaface -- but that's just part of the deal. Students now have to Google Calendar, Google Talk for instant messaging, Google Docs for real-time collaboration on documents and projects, and Google Sites, where students can create their own websites.

Better and improved services -- and a huge cost savings -- make it a no-brainer for an enterprise-wide implementation, says Matt Lawson, director of enterprise services for the VCCS.

Many higher education institutions are leaving behind old email programs in favor of working with Google Apps-Education Edition, including the University of Virginia.  The trend is spreading to community colleges as well.

With more than 300,000 student accounts, Virginia's Community Colleges will become one of the largest implementations of the service.

The migration from the previous email was done over the weekend, and was completely seamless. Monday when they signed in, they had all their mail in Gmail.

One small (not) benefit:  all the benefits of Gmail, none of the advertising.

It's a strong move.

-- Posted by Susan Hayden

online calendars are never going to set the world alight but google's offering builds on the success of some of their other services and includes features like sms reminder messaging free of charge. one of the smartest features within the application is 'quick add', which analyses the text you've typed into the globally available pop up window and creates a calendar entry based upon what you have written. it does so with surprising accuracy and it soon becomes your default method of adding events

the main screen displays events in day, week, month, 2 week and agenda views. selecting an event from the main calendar window allows you to edit the event details, delete the event or view the location via google maps

editing detailed event information allows you to set up repetitions, edit the events duration and add a detailed description. you can edit dates manually or drag and drop them on the main screen

google have provided three types of event reminder: pop-up, email and sms. within the uk the sms functionality is restricted to sending text message reminders a set number of minutes before the event is due to begin. set up is quick and free of charge and you wont find yourself receiving unwanted texts from associated third parties. in the united states the service has been extended and you are able to add calendar events via sms. it's a great service for those without a web enabled mobile phone and although all of the google apps seem to perpetually be in beta, it's also reliable

google are really pushing the idea of letting you share your data with friends and the public across all of their online apps. calendar is no exception and lets you add other people's google calendars to your own, share you calendar with others and it even lets you publish content via rss feeds or web pages

you can create multiple calenders to help manage things like work and home events, allowing you to show all or just selected calenders. this can be used to overcome a constraint in the basic calendar functionality whereby you can't tag events depending on type. it's tough to criticise a free service but as yet there's also no easy way to sync with imap enabled calendar tools such as microsoft's outlook without the use of third party sites or software. as you'd expect, the service works well with the iphone and other mobile platforms and will likely work even better with android based mobile handsets

in summary, google calendar is a very good product offering a decent feature set without charge. as you'd expect from a company that makes most of it's revenue via online advertising their 'adsense' adverts feature within the calender but are limited to a small area down the right hand side of the page. it's a small price to pay for the functionality on offer. with the increasing level of integration between the googles online web services this is certainly something to try out if you are in the market for an cloud-based calendar solution

Please be aware Google Apps is not ready for widespread implementation for employees at this time; early adopters will be running on a calendaring system separate from the rest of the University.

Other caveats include:

• The possibility the University will not migrate to Google Apps and will stay with GroupWise, meaning opt-in participants may eventually be migrated back to GroupWise.
• GroupWise email and archived data will not be migrated to Google Apps. It will remain in a database on your computer.
• GroupWise software will be removed from opt-in participant's computers.

Benefits of using Google Apps include using the Gmail email system, which features over 7 gigabytes of disk space per account (and growing each day), mail search and filtering tools, and integrated chat. And, unlike GroupWise, Gmail does not have a separate "archive" database; enough disk space is included in with your account for all your mail to stay in one place.

For more information on Google Apps for Employees opt-in and GroupWise migration processes, please see the OIT Help Desk's website at http://helpdesk.boisestate.edu/email/googleapps, or contact the OIT Help Desk by phone at 426-4357 or by email at helpdesk@boisestate.edu.