Telstra joins PaaS gold rush with T-Suite

Steve Hodgkinson
Friday, 20 June 2008 10:05

IT Industry - Strategy

Google's aim is to entice developers onto its platform by subsidising the cost for entrepreneurs of developing and launching a new web application.

Charges only kick in when usage hits a nominated number of page impressions per month – currently 5 million. Developers would see this as a PaaS offering.

What's in it for Google? New apps provide increased value for Google's platform, driving up usage and creating additional opportunities for advertising revenues.

The key point though is that applications create additional sources of data for Google's search panopticon and new 'sticky points' for insertion of targeted advertisements.

The third is IBM's Bluehouse offering. Bluehouse is the working name of a new service under development to bring its Lotus software capabilities to the SMB market using a combined SaaS and PaaS delivery model.

The offering will comprise a bundle of services called Lotus Foundations which will provide file management, directory services, backup and recovery, email, office productivity applications and integrated business applications – just the ticket for under-resourced SMBs.

Bluehouse will host the Lotus Foundations applications and provide a hub for secure interaction and collaboration between SMBs and their customers, peers and suppliers via social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing.

IBM has been circumspect about its commercial model for Bluehouse, but it is likely to be similar to that of salesforce.com – fees for services, with the upside for IBM being to open up an SMB market that it hitherto has not addressed.

What are the benefits of T-Suite for Telstra?

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