Next Wave Computing

As systems engineers, administrators, and integrators, one of the biggest challenges is collaboration – making it as easy as possible for your users to work together from their desks, wherever they may be. Some people like to work from home, while others are in the office – how do you maintain the user experience across the corporate boundaries?

Further, the complexity increases by orders of magnitude when you want to start collaborating with business partners OUTSIDE of your organisation. Suppliers, customers, vendors. The security and connectivity issues alone are almost mind-numblingly difficult to resolve in many instances.

Enter Google, and their upcoming Google Wave product. The following is a recent presentation made to developers about this astounding solution. It’s about 80 minutes long, but worth the watch – you’ll be amazed at how interoperable the solution is.

One of the biggest criticisms of other Google products, such as Google Docs, is that Google is ultimately holding your data. Wave is truly next generation – or “next wave” if you like – and allows the stunning power of Google Wave to live in your own data centre, rather than Google’s.

The platform will be completely open-source, and will allow organisations to run their own Wave servers, and inter-operate – or “federate” – with other Wave servers from other organisations.

In a couple of words – this product blows me away. Watch the video and see what you think about it.