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On September 15th the White House announced Apps.gov with this exciting sentence: “Now, Even the Government Has an App Store .
Actually, Apps.gov is a marketplace for acquisition of (definition taken by Apps.gov site FAQs):
“…convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”.
Despite the information available on FAQs clarifies the big picture behind the initiative some important details remain obscure (to me at least).
Many of us would expect the adoption of this kind of services in the Gov sector, and this was actually happening in the US as well as worldwide, but, almost anyone, could expect an embracement to happen in this form.
I would expect Government agencies to run private gov national *aaS infrastructures (possibly deriving from existing data centers being gradually networked) being consolidated in time and being empowered ideally and hopefully from Free software, at least from open source software (in line with transparency efforts). This is simply not happening.
original credits @ random letters - jessiemoore
What deals with Free software & transparency better than the gov sector? isn’t it a matter of freedom when we talk of an efficient public sector, independent from software services industry giants? Instead, what we see is the GSA stating who’s good and who’s bad in the *aaS industry.
Why do not use the stimulus that the Government can put on the industry at least to dictate a transparency standard as the GNU AGPL License?
If you look here you’ll see a list of (free) services. For sure, some of them could represent a benefit to the productivity of the Gov sector but, for sure, all those services have a business model: what if this model changes ending up with a cost where something was free, how to control the impact on budgets?
Have anybody analyzed how data lock in could affect administration budget? Ok, critical data will be kept outside the cloud: not critical data kept in the cloud will be, for sure, subject to some sort of data lock in (data lock in is one of the main business drivers for social\*aaS apps, isn’t it?).
Did anybody made a long term assessment of the effects? Is there any strategy behind this, apart from lowering the amount of investments needed in the short term? Are we sure that the TCO will be lesser than with a strategically driven initiative, trying to keep things transparent, based on Free software and injecting innovation into the SW development community?
It’s true that we’re exiting the SOA bubble era but, it’s undubitable, that some sort of application orchestration that is recently being embodied by BPM and portals is useful to productivity and efficiency. How this is impacted by the *aaS paradigm? I’m afraid that, at a given point, the need of applications/service interwork, instead of favouring open standards will end up in an even harder provider lock in.
Do you remember that during the first post-election press conference made by President Obama, he was flanked by Eric Schmidt? Politico.com gave this lucid statement:
“Google CEO Eric Schmidt didn’t say anything as he flanked President-elect Barack Obama during his first post-election press conference. He didn’t have to.The image alone of Schmidt standing elbow-to-elbow with Obama’s top economic thinkers was enough to send shivers up the spine of Google’s competitors.”
I’ve not been surprised when Google expressed appreciation:
“The cloud is coming of age, and we applaud the Obama Administration’s efforts to ensure our government realizes its many advantages”
Google is also working the FISMA certification needed to be on Google Apps. The global Google gov initiative is optimally recapped by Chloe Albanesius on PCMag.
At the end, what surprise me much, is the, almost total, lack of discussion on this topic: take a look to apps.gov on google trends and compare it with other hot topics.
I continue reading so much enthusiastic comments: there’s a big chance this initiative will be followed by potentially any Government agency worldwide, does anybody share my concerns?
I often read Jonathan Schwartz blog posts with big interest, at least since they’re as rarest than mine and, at the end, I always enjoy to see his smiling face 
Jon
I’m sure that Jon has lot more to do than me now that the new boss, that strange Larry with the sailing hobby, is on board.
On May the 18th Jon wrote this interesting post on his blog where he advocates java being the ideal candidate to become “the” application store of the next generation.
Now, I’m a bit confused. After reading the blog post a couple of times, I eventually came up to few conclusions and lots of questions that I’ll try to summarize, also encouraging you to share your views.
The application store hype comes from the mobile devices market where it was created, by a visionary like Steve Jobs, mostly due to two reasons: design a new value chain while controlling totally the product. With time passing and new mindsets facing the app store phenom, we’ ve seen lots of different ideas and, recently, with Nokia debuting as well as Google and others, we’ve a clear idea of what a mobile app store could be.
On the other hand, Mobile app store have introduced new concepts in application delivery that simply makes sense. Things like crowdsourcing application quality review, a crucial feature for every app market, or quality certification programs (like Apple does) make sense also for a desktop and notebook market, but, more important, make sense for netbooks and MIDs. Canonical working to enable Dalvik VM and Android Market for ubuntu make me think that we should give a try to Sun and Oracle for this strange idea of the world-domination-dream-java-app-market.
Anyway, the step from successful co-marketing initiatives like the ones with the toolbars, to a promise of the killer application (store) and the perfect software delivery and distribution environment is a giant size step.
But, Jon, I’ve many question from the very beginning: will this Java-Store deliver only Java apps? Will be Windows centered? or at least Desktop Centered? will embrace or be embraced by mobile platform vendors in you plans?
Is this finally the “all screen of your life” java that we are expecting since the very beginning of the Java dream?
A successful java market should exploit java pervasivity, java ease of use and outstanding adoption rate to become the central and preferred point of sales and distribution of java resources, from client applications to server components and, in general, enterprise resources.
The Java app store should be the ideal channel:
- to access cloud provided services and monitor IaaS performances
- to buy support and acquisition licenses from the commercial software providers
- to provide update and patch management services
- for open source projects to provide access to software releases
The Java app store should be accompanied with:
- an app engine/libraries set to embed Sun/Oracle IaaS in Java environment
- new partnership programs to ease the adoption and porting across different platforms (for Desktops, MIDs, Mobiles and Server technology providers)
- revenue share programs for developers
- optional software quality certifications programs
Finally I tried to manage to wrote down the following schema to help myself to figure out what the new Java market idea could be, at the end:
the java app store as it could be (click to enlarge)
Unfortunately, if you look to Runtime Bob’s latest post on Symbian Foundation blog, it seems that neither at Symbian, where Java was meant to be a first class citizen, they’ve a clear idea of what “the future of java” will be. Today Symbian dev portal has gone beta and is available for you at https://developer.symbian.org/.
Looking at the JME section it seems they are serious about Java.
Hopefully at Sun tomeone has a clearest idea of the future of java. At least at Oracle they’ve, I’m sure
Unfortunately mine is different from the one that the latest statement at Sun, i.e. that the new Java Garbace collector (G1) will be available only for support license subscribers, advocates.
Let’s see. JavaOne will probably give us some new food for thoughts.
thanks and credits to Pixie Led
It’s been a few months that I’m thinking about “cloud” business. Even if the concept of SaaS is around since early 21th century thanks to visionary people like Tim O’reilly and others, if you give a look to this, it appears very clearly how, instead, “cloud computing” concept seems something that no ones comprehends completely or at least a container of lot’s of interesting things like *aaS, paravirtualization, grid computing, thin clients, etc…
Anyway, let’s try to go beyond the complexity of terms and to focus on a couple of ideas: SaaS on one hand and PaaS/IaaS on the other hand. With SaaS I actually mean a provider creating a software and then suppliyng this software “aaS” via the interent to the customer base (a good example could be SalesForce.com, a truly pioneer company or WordPress.co – even if in this case the end user is more a single person than a company). On the other hand we have PaaS/IaaS offering providing the customers with, generally, lower layers empowered by runnig on top of a cloud (data center 
), easy scaling and exposing (sometimes exclusive) API’s or performance enhancements that can differentiate from what we formarly know as an hosting service.
For what regars the SaaS/IaaS area I completely agree with Simon Wardley at Gardeviance when he says:
“The real battleground for the “cloud” has always been in building an ecosystem around the framework layer of the computing stack.”
So is a matter of enrich a traditional paravirtualization approach with new and powerful tools (like open API’s could be). Isn’t it?
Given that short distinction (I know maybe you could have different ideas) lets try to focus on the opportunities that the gives to different players on the Information Technology market.
From the End user company perspective, I believe that one of the main drivers of IaaS,PaaS is truly the cost. Who would’t agree with having the IT resources commoditized and available on-demand with no or small configuration effort? surely I’ld generally do.
Unfortunately, more or less in line with what Dennis Howlett was saying some days ago on ZDNET:
“Putting my buyer’s hat on, I want my computing infrastructure to be available on demand at the lowest possible cost. I want to drive those baseline cost efficiencies into as many of my applications as possible, but not at the expense of sacrificing or endangering security, or my ability to run a compliant set of applications. In many scenarios and especially those that are regulated, operational code ‘ownership’ is important.”
security and compliance constraints can show up really soon an made you reflect more on the choice.
Some days ago, when I was talking about this with Andrea I realized that, in fact, core services/applications are typically difficult or unworthy to “cloudized” (being erogated via a PaaS/IaaS) due to a bunch of reasons: security and privacy of the data, responsibility about system availability, code ownership and disclosure bonds.
In fact is very common that the bigger part of a solution’s (or architecture) TCO is merely represented by the data tier in itself. Normally, the data tier also is the tier most subject to constrictive security and availability/continuity rules (since, indubitably no system works without the data).
These few reasons actually could represent a blocking issue especially for customers dealing with critical infrastructures (eg: defense or public safety sector) that, on the other hand, would tipically require an adaptive infrastructure able to manage peaks and, sometimes, bursts.
Even if there is a very wide set of end customers in the Service sector that whould be interested in approaching PaaS/IaaS (having a set of less restrictive continuity/security rules) for example TELCOs, Post&Logistics or e-commerce, we must consider that, very often, such kind of customers have a pre-existing infrastructure that have been consolidated in time, often thanks to relevant investments in OSS/BSS systems and often including a relevant level of cooperation among different parts (with a strong SoA orientation) and managed by large teams with consistent knowhows and values.
Instead of focusing on the biggest customers out there, IaaS/PaaS players should concentrate on emerging companies, that from the start, should build their own infrastructures simply seeing IaaS/PaaS as one of the choices, one of the available tools. And, to be true, it’s merely what I see offered right now by MS Azure, Amazon Ec2 or Google App Engine. A powerful and appealing offering in this area should be based on openness (API’s, standards) and ecosystem (spread knowledge, create new skills for developers, engage SIs and other player as partners).
The opportunity for promoting new views when buildling an infrastructure are here, now we wait for the community to get interested, evaluate, promote, use and finally make it a standard solution to standard problems.
Obviously the ecosystem is made in itself by very different players. If we put an eye to potentially involved third parties (ISV, product companies,consulting and oustourcing firms, System Integrators) this effectively represents a big opporunity, and is a matter of vision and promptness to catch it.
I’m not so aware about US situation. I’m quite more informed about EU side, since I’m working for an European consultancy firm that is actually a leader in innovation and very well distributed across all Europe thanks ot its subsidiaries.
I could say that the overall openness to investments in Europe is not so high. IMHO this scarce availability to invest have often prevented good ideas, innovative services and propositions, reliyng on a networked infrastructure, to have their chance on the market. In fact, upfront investments, often keep the ideas sleeping until the first customers shows up and, very often, gets parially and implicitly charged of part of the CAPEX.
We can think PaaS/IaaS and Open Source software to be used from third parties to create SaaS or other offerings with lower upfront investments needed.
It will surely represents a key success factor, the ability of PaaS/IaaS providers to ensure little or no downtime in the future and to avoid that things like this show up again in the future. In fact 8 hours downtime will prevent not only critical infrastructures to exploit the IaaS/PaaS paradigm but also player used to think by a money per transaction per second paradigm.
At the end, I believe that “Cloud computing” actually represents another innovation driver, as Open Source is being more and more.
Is there an opportunity out there. We need only to catch it. And, since we’re talking about clouds, we should start thinking that sky’s the limit 
