How Far Will Google Wave Go?

Description

How Far Will Google Wave Go?

Dan Woods , 11.03.09, 06:00 AM EST SAP's Gravity shows the online collaboration tool's future as a business platform.

Google Wave, the Internet giant's new online collaboration tool, has generated much buzz among developers, and now it has a large geeky fan following doing strange and relatively useless things. You can check out some of the silliness at the Google Wave Extensions List .

But for me, and likely for the rest of the world of IT, much of the buzz around the Google Wave Sandbox and the consumer-facing applications is just a sideshow, a brilliant stroke of marketing. As Tom Mornini, chief technology officer and founder of Engine Yard, pointed out recently (see: "The Real Meaning of Google Wave" ), the major impact of Google Wave will ultimately come from its power as a development platform for serious, distributed applications.

SAP Research 's ( SAP - news - people ) use of Google Wave in its Gravity demonstration prototype makes this point abundantly clear. But the long-term implications of Google Wave for enterprise computing are not yet evident. This week, we look at Gravity to brainstorm about the future of Google Wave and its likely emergence as both an opportunity and threat to most existing enterprise software vendors.

Gravity brings SAP's business process modeling (BPM) technology together with Google Wave, so that many people can work on the same Business Process Model at the same time, seeing each other's work and exchanging comments. This is no toy but a real solution that enables collaboration on complex business problems.

Google Wave is a departure from the world of Web sites and most other applications, where there is a central server using the HTTP protocol sending information to browsers that then display the pages and ...

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http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/02/sap-gravity-software-technology-cio-network-google-wave.html

http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/02/sap-gravity-software-technology-cio-network-google-wave.html