Google has formed an intriguing partnership with VMware, as Google looks to build out its online business software services for companies.
Both created at roughly the same time by people with ties to Stanford, Google and VMware have been at odds for most of their history. Their products rarely overlapped, but as the high-fliers of the moment, the companies fought to hire the most talented software engineers in Silicon Valley.
Diane Greene, VMware’s first chief executive, would often complain to me about Google’s hiring all the top brains. (Ms. Greene says in a comment on this post that VMware competed well for the top engineering talent in the Valley.) Meanwhile, VMware has done its fair share of poaching people from Google.
The companies have tabled these differences and decided to go after the so-called cloud computing market together. This week, Google announced fairly broad support for some of the Java software tools that VMware acquired last year in its purchase of SpringSource.
Putting some of the immediate technical minutiae to the side, you’ll find the meat of the partnership revolving around the idea that customers will be able to move their software between Google’s cloud and clouds based on technology from VMware with relative, theoretically, ease.
So, this is Google and VMware joining hands in a kumbaya moment and saying: “There’s no lock-in if you work with us. Please ask Amazon.com and Microsoft about their take on this.”
Away from the VMware deal, Google celebrated its App Engine for Business platform.
To date, App Engine has mostly been used by developers of large Web sites. It gave these developers a place to run applications on Google’s infrastructure on a rental model and get access to Google’s scale and horsepower if they needed it.
Now Google wants to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft and bring more traditional businesses to its infrastructure. So, it has released things like a new management console for managing lots of applications and a new pricing model.
In the near future, Google plans to add a formal up-time guarantee and support services.
If you’re keeping score at home, Amazon.com offers customers more of an infrastructure-type service in which they can rent space on servers and storage systems and do what they like with the hardware via the Web. Microsoft, with Azure, does more of a platform-type service, in which customers basically create applications to run in Microsoft’s data centers with Microsoft handling most of the grunt work. Google is heading more in this Azure direction.
David Glazer, an engineering director at Google, said that Google’s platform was more open than Microsoft’s. Google supports open programming languages and lots of open-source software.
Over on Azure, you have to use Microsoft’s software and Microsoft’s programming tools, Mr. Glazer warned.
That’s sort of true. Microsoft certainly promotes its own technology, but you can run things like the open-source MySQL on Azure and use open-source-friendly programming languages.
True, Mr. Glazer conceded, adding: “It’s not what you can do, but what you can do practically. You have to ask what things are solidly supported and what tools and models you’re being tilted toward.”
Google and VMware could present a formidable challenge to the likes of Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud, particularly since so much of cloud computing relies on virtualization software, and it is there that VMware is the undisputed king.
As it turns out, virtualization software is just about the only thing Google doesn’t make or give away these days. So – welcome, VMware.
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