Power

Google wants to bring back the enterprise web application — with Chrome at the center

The Modern Computing Alliance includes 11 prominent tech companies that have agreed to design their products to work better together as part of a new effort to resurrect web applications.

Google wants to bring back the enterprise web application — with Chrome at the center

The alliance members have pledged to devote engineering time toward making their products work better together.

Image: Google

After a year during which businesses embraced cloud-based enterprise software at an astounding pace, Google wants to make its Chrome browser and Chrome OS devices the preferred vehicle for a new way of working.

Google has assembled 11 enterprise tech companies in the Modern Computing Alliance, which will be unveiled Thursday. The idea behind the alliance is to encourage enterprise software vendors to work closely with Google and Intel to improve the performance of their services on Chrome and Chrome OS, and also resurrect the concept of "progressive web applications," said John Solomon, vice president for Chrome OS at Google.

"We've realized that the demands for computing are becoming increasingly complex," Solomon said in an interview with Protocol. "Many systems today are not optimized for all-day videoconferencing in a rich application environment, and that is because the end-to-end systems are not designed with that in mind."

The alliance members have pledged to devote engineering time toward making their products work better together, said Chris Walker, vice president and general manager for mobile client platforms at Intel, an inaugural member.

"This is an engineering-first work group," Walker said. Solomon agreed: "There's a tremendous opportunity [in just] performance improvements, not to mention security improvements."

Many of the enterprise tools embraced by remote workers this year — including alliance members Zoom, Slack and Box — are used through desktop or mobile apps on Macs, PCs, iPhones and Android devices. Through the alliance, Google wants to encourage software vendors to build web applications as performant and easy-to-use as their desktop alternatives — so long as Chrome or Chrome OS is the target.

"If an enterprise decides that they want to use Chrome OS to modernize their endpoint computers, we want to make sure that the applications they run today run unbelievably well from a performance perspective, from a security perspective, [including] identity and infrastructure," Solomon said.

About a decade ago, progressive web applications were considered the path forward for mobile developers looking to avoid creating two different applications for iOS and Android, but they never really caught on. Back in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg actually considered the time spent trying to develop a web application "the biggest mistake we've made as a company."

But a lot of things have changed this year. Companies are relying on cloud enterprise software for just about everything right now; meetings that used to take place in conference rooms without devices are now being conducted entirely online. And IT controls designed for physical networks and buildings don't work when we're working from home.

Standardizing on Chrome or Chrome OS apps developed through the alliance will give IT departments better data about how their workers are using their tools, as well as "recommendations on how to optimize workflow experiences and automate repetitive tasks, to facilitate improved system efficiency," according to a Google blog post.

"The web has come a long way," Solomon said. "The technologies available with Service Workers, and the way Chromium [the open-source version of Chrome] has come along, the web platform has developed so much that you're seeing progressive web apps now that are performing across areas no one could have imagined."

The other companies participating in the Modern Computing Alliance include Box, Citrix, Dell, Imprivata, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMware and Zoom. More details are expected to be released in the first half of 2021 on products co-developed through the alliance, and Google is actively soliciting other companies to join.

Correction: This article was updated at 1:01 p.m. PT to correct Chris Walker's title.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins