eXo Industry Trends Part 6

Salesforce Chatter and VMWare Zimbra

One of the biggest signals of a shift in the market comes when innovative companies make major moves. The two announcements above are a very clear move toward higher level services deployed in a Cloud - the type of architecture that eXo enables.

Salesforce Chatter is
a new layer on the Force.com development platform (sound familiar to the eXo platform running on top of the Java development platform?). This is a major release that offers direct capabilities to Salesforce users. However, the real power is making this a platform for others to extend their own Force.com applications.

Here is how Salesforce describes it: "With the new Chatter platform, collaboration features and capabilities will be available for any application built and run on the platform. Your custom apps will generate real-time feed updates, incorporate user profiles, and encourage dynamic interactions between people and groups." (Geez, this again sounds familiar with eXo for the Java application community).

VMWare made a big move last year in acquiring Spring and Hyperic - demonstrating their understanding that the cloud is more than simply about virtualized machines. Application platforms need to be designed for the web, as I reviewed in my Cloud Characteristics blog in this eXo series. Their recent acquisition of Zimbra gives them a set of "out of the box" services that their partners and service providers can take to market. VMWare's ambitions are clearly large and centered on the future of Cloud architectures, and seen in the diagram.

The Java community has over 4 Million developers. This huge base needs to move toward these new architectures. Their employers need them to be more productive and for their applications and services to reach the market sooner. And their users need and want the type of interactive, content-aware, collaborative, social and knowledge services that the consumer web is bringing. Exactly what these two technology thought leaders are driving to market.

This is a key reason why I think the eXo Platform is so exciting and relevant to the next steps of the Java marketplace. Work should be fun and meaningful, and this is all of that!

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