Climbing on early to the “next big thing,” major vendors and a lot of start-ups are staking out their claim in the cloud computing space. The basic idea for these cloud-based applications is that users sign on and do all of their work through the platform rather than logging into their PC and working on the desktop. However, according to eXpresso CEO George Langan, there is a disconnect between the way people work and what these companies are trying to do.

“You never worked in a single application,” explained Langan. So, to bridge the gap his company is helping develop software that will do what users want to do in any of the platforms, like Salesforce.com. But beyond developing working applications, they are focused on making their product accessible by all of the different platforms for easier sharing between users.

There are around 25 platforms right now and they’re proliferating. The major vendors include

• Salesforce.com
• WebEx Connect
• Amazon
• OpSource
• Yahoo! (Zimbra)
• Google
• Microsoft

Along with start-ups such as: Coghead, Mosso, and Joynet.

An example of eXpresso’s integration works is given in the company’s briefing packet, which includes screen shots of how eXpresso works in the Salesforce.com platform. The initial goal of the company was to integrate Excel documents across platforms, but now it is expanding to other file types.

The problem, explained Langan, is that there needs to be portability between application and files between business applications. If the WebEx Connect platform is your platform of choice and you need to work with someone on a different platform or no platform at all, you can invite them through eXpresso to view the document or file. Additionally, eXpresso allows you to put permissions on the document to control change, and the shared document is stored on an eXpresso server.

I was curious as to the reason behind the concept of cloud computing, and Langan shared that essentially, “What everyone wants to do is replace the desktop. They want to take away the Microsoft dominance of the desktop and desktop applications. Salesforce.com was the pioneer, and they’re starting to gain a tremendous amount of footprint. And Google Docs is making tremendous inroads. When Yahoo bought Zimbra, they claimed it had 600-700,000 users. Amazon claims they’ll be deriving more business from computer applications than from their retail sales.” Langan sees quite a future in this type of platform computing. He even predicts that email may be soon be obsolete. When asked what he thought would replace email, he answered “instant messaging.” At his own company, he guessed that they have cut down use of email by 40-50%, simply using the instant messaging in WebEx Connect.

“You end up sharing things in spaces instead of sending them around,” said Langan. “This generation of Web 2.0 platforms allows us to replicate the workspace we had 20 years ago. I used to work at ATT in Times Square. There were 1800 people in the building I worked in, with 125 people on the floor I was on. We walked around to talk to people about projects. But now at eXpresso, we do our developing in Vietnam and Romania and 10 people scattered around the United States in five states. Instant messaging is equivalent to walking around the floor in Times Square, but now done on the desktop.”

Langan predicts that “Businesses are going to start realizing the value of the technology — and then there will start being mandates to use the technology.” He explained that the real value is in how work is changing. “I think this is as exciting as the shift from corporate systems that were mainframes and client server based to PCs.” And while the eXpresso offering is currently the only platform integrator on the market, Langan predicts that more companies will appear in the next six to nine months, as it fills a gap in the increasingly cloudy skies.