Jan 23 2008
Google Enters Business Intelligence Market?
OK, so the title is a bit overstated, but now that I have your attention:
A couple months ago Google [quietly] released a hosted charting API. Albeit it lacks the sex appeal of their big splash products like GMail or Google Docs, it tapped my imagination.
The basic concept is that your application passes parameters to a URL hosted at Google. It allows you to define things like chart type, size, colors, data values, etc. For example, hitting this URL,
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:hW&chs=250x100&chl=Hello|World
returns the following image:
Part of the reason this grabbed my attention is that its very similar to Latigent’s BlueVue (now Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite ((CUIS))) “API” for accessing reports & charts from other applications (except you don’t actually pass the data to CUIS, since that’s the real point of having a full blown BI App 
What I find amusing here is that Google, whether intentionally or not, has basically entered into the 3rd party control business. Very few people ever build their own charting control as its not core to their application, and there are inexpensive alternatives to coding your own. Google just introduced another inexpensive option. Now, I seriously doubt that Google will ever cut into the market share of guys like Dundas, but it could certainly address the needs of some low-level apps.
Expanding on this hosted API/3rd Party Control concept, it’s reasonable to think that a creative developer could duct-tape together the APIs from Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Charts, Google Reader (unsupported “API” here) and Google Search Appliance to come up with a rudimentary and functional presentation layer for a reporting application.
When you pepper in things like databases in the cloud, one begins to ponder if every aspect of an application will eventually be distributed, and perhaps the next software evolution will be nothing but middleware that glues stuff together.
