With VMware's Help, Google Targets Enterprise

In a keynote Wednesday at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco, Paul Maritz, president and CEO of VMware, said developing apps for the cloud has been a difficult challenge because these apps need to run everywhere on a multitude of devices.

"It's clear that there are going to be many clouds out there. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have way of writing apps that could take full advantage of the cloud?" Maritz said.

VMware and Google believe that extended development frameworks provide a level of flexibility that makes them suitable as the new "operating system" for the cloud. And VMware's Spring Framework, an enterprise Java programming model used by more than two million of the world's developers, is at the center of the company's partnership with Google.

VMware has been working with Google since late last year on writing back end, high performance apps that complement what Google is developing around the front end, according to Maritz. The idea is to give the industry "an open source layer to cloak the clouds" and get more out of their investments, Moritz said.

Under the partnership, SpringSource's Tool Suite, and a new rapid application development tool called Spring Roo, have been integrated with the Google Web Toolkit in a toolset that's now available for download.

With the Google-SpringSource integration, "You get the power of HTML5 in a complete Java stack that’s completely integrated from the back end to the front end," Maritz said.

Developers, meanwhile, get better return on their investment by having broader areas to target. "Google and VMware are bringing the cloud to the enterprise," said David Glazer, Google's director of engineering, during the keynote. "Open standards enable innovation, and we've been working closely with Vmware to enable exactly that."

At I/O Wednesday, Google unveiled a preview of App Engine For Business, an enterprise focused version of App Engine that adds centralized administration, advanced support and a 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement.

Google will offer App Engine For Business through a consumption based model in which each application costs $8 per user, per month, with a maximum of $1000 per month. Later this year, Google plans to add more enterprise features such as hosted SQL databases, SSL, and access to other advanced services.

Google's competitors often point to the company's consumer pedigree and lack of enterprise chops. By teaming up with VMware, which has loads of enterprise experience, Google is showing it knows where to go to glean the knowledge it needs to move forward in this space.