It's life Jim, but not as we know it

We were at the Google Campfire One event yesterday for the launch of several major developments that bring the Cloud closer to Enterprise Applications in a secure and open standards manner.

The video shows Mark Woollen, VP Social CRM Applications, demonstrating how Google Gadgets and Google Applications running on a private Google site provisioned for an Enterprise customer (but hosted by Google) can access on premise CRM services and data (or any other data from other Oracle Applications for that matter) in a manner that IT can be comfortable with. The open source Google Secure Data Connector sits behind the firewall and allows traffic from the Google site domain to access information from the CRM application. Authentication is done through OAuth.

This is an exciting development because it helps developers deliver new applications and gadgets in the cloud that can co-exist seamlessly with traditional behind the firewall enterprise applications and data. The solution makes use of the new REST API's currently in development for Siebel. The REST API's are being built in a versionless manner - so any Siebel version or vertical solution can take advantage of the cloud. [In Beta, see bottom of post for contacts]

Perhaps the other major announcement is the availability of the Google Java App Engine.

Imagine that you have built a great application running on Oracle Weblogic Server and you want to now deliver some subset of that capability to a third party organisation such as a business partner. Google and Oracle are champions of standardisation. By following standards it is now possible to take your Oracle Weblogic application and run it on the Google AppEngine. It is now possible to build Java applications on the AppEngine and have them work with Siebel - either through the REST API's or even the Siebel Java Data Bean. You old timers will recall the Siebel Java Wizard. Well it's time to take that for a spin and see what cool cloud apps you can build to work with Siebel. Remember - you get all the benefits of hosting (no set up, no hardware, no initial startup cost) but without the drawbacks of proprietary, walled-garden SaaS platforms. It's great news for developers, great news for open standards and brilliant news for customers. So what are you waiting for? Head over to http://code.google.com/appengine/ and get started today!

For details contact Mark Woollen, Mandeep Bhullar or Dipock Das.

Great news for all you folks out there that want all the great stuff that's in the latest version of Siebel CRM so badly that the thought of sitting and installing the software drives you mad with anticpation - you can now download the latest version of Siebel as an Oracle VM image. The Siebel 8.0 image is no longer available for download.

Using this virtualized product, You can have your entire Siebel 8.1.1 instance up and running within a few hours of download. There are many well documented financial savings and environmental benefits to be gained from running your applications in a virtualised environment (I've posted a high level already on this blog).

To get the VM image - go here http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux (not the application section).

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead, download today, start saving money and saving the planet.

Have fun!