Google Ups the Ante with App Engine for Business and VMware Alliance

Google is upping the ante in its push for cloud computing dominance as it focuses on the enterprise with a couple of interesting announcements at the start of Google I/O, its annual developer conference in San Francisco. The company launched App Engine for Business, priced at $8/user/month and a new alliance with VMware that will center around cloud portability and reducing vendor lock-in.

Here's how Google is describing them:

App Engine for Business: Google App Engine for Business lets companies build and maintain their own applications on the same scalable infrastructure that powers Google applications, with added management and support features tailored specifically for the enterprise. New capabilities for businesses include the ability to manage all the apps in an organization from one place, simple pricing based on users and applications, premium developer support, a 99.9% uptime service level agreement, and coming later this year, access to premium features like cloud-based SQL and SSL.

VMware Collaboration: Google and VMware introduce cloud portability, which makes it easy for Java developers to use familiar tools to rapidly develop and deploy rich web apps in the environments of their choice. In just one click, users of the new versions of SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Web Toolkit can deploy their application onto Google App Engine for Business, or a VMware environment, or other infrastructure such as Amazon EC2.

Also, anticipated is an announcement by Google to compete more head-on with Amazon in the area of on-demand storage. The new offering, Google Storage for Developers, is - as the name says - targeted at developers and will, it has been speculated, remove many of the current restrictions from its basic Gmail storage solution. For example, there won't be a limit on the types of files that can be stored and it is supposed to be more secure and stable offering geared towards the needs of developers.