Google Gears – Lifeline of SaaS

After Google made an announcement about the offline capability of Gmail using Google Gears, Raju Vegesna, Zoho Evangelist, wrote a post listing various applications that make use of Google Gears to offer offline capability. The list shows some surprising (?) names, and just in case it's not complete, feel free to add to it. (Disclaimer: Zoho is the exclusive sponsor of this blog.) This finally forced me to write a post appreciating the role played by Google Gears in the field of SaaS.

Apart from the technological capability, the very fact that Google released it as opensource made it easy for other companies, including those who compete with Google directly, to adapt it in their environment to offer offline capability in their SaaS applications. This is an important example of opensource playing an important role in SaaS.

Google Gears is also available for mobile devices. Buxfer Mobile and Zoho Mobile are already using it in their mobile applications. Mobile is rucial for SaaS success. Google Gears for mobile makes gears one of the most important component of successful SaaS applications.

The general opinion about Google Gears is that it is a tool available to make SaaS applications work offline. Eduard Martini of O’Reilly’s InsideRIA Blog has written a great article where he points out the other benefits of Google Gears and how it can be implemented in a SaaS application. Let me rehash the main points of his article here to highlight the importance of Google Gears with respect to SaaS.

Speed: By using a fully manageable local cache, Google Gears can speed up applications
Advanced Caching: By using the local SQLlite database and API access to servers, Google Gears can cache redundant data locally and querying the database for other intensive queries
Local Full Text Search: Using the above caching technique, search could be done on the client machine without loading up the server
Prevent Browser Freezing Caused by Intensive Javascript
Moving part of application functionality to client side
Making data available offline
Geolocation API: Using Wifi signals to identify user’s location within 200 m in major cities

With further improvements in the future, Google Gears is going to be the one of the important components for SaaS and its success.