Salesforce.com builds another bridge to Google’s cloud

December 7, 2008 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Business software company Salesforce.com is moving forward with efforts to connect Force.com, its platform for business applications, with other Internet “clouds.” Just last month, the San Francisco company announced it would connect Force.com with Amazon Web Services; now it’s launching Force.com services for Google App Engine, the search giant’s platform for web applications.

Adam Gross, Salesforce’s vice president of platform marketing, says most applications built on the App Engine tend to be more social- and consumer-focused. Force.com, of course, has been all about business applications. Now applications can tap into both platforms, drawing on both Google’s infrastructure and Force.com’s business tools and data.

Gross says the partnership isn’t launching with any flagship applications, but he showed me one example of how App Engine and Force.com could be brought together. Appirio, a startup that specializes in connecting cloud platforms, built a simple slot machine game that runs on Google App Engine. Casino company Harrah’s can then add the game to its site, which runs on Force.com.

Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff has touted his vision to connect various Internet clouds, in contrast with software giant Microsoft, which is launching its own platform for Internet applications, called Windows Azure. (Gross, incidentally, said Salesforce might be interested in partnering with Azure, but it’s too early to say.) Some commentators chalked those claims up as hyperbole, and it’s true that Force.com can be called “open” only in a few specific ways. Still, the Google announcement, coupled with the previously-announced compatibility with Amazon and Facebook, are laudable moves in this direction.

Salesforce, whose bread-and-butter business comes from customer relationship management (CRM) software, has partnered with Google before, most recently by allowing Force.com applications to access data from Google Apps.

[photo:flickr/Rhys Jones Photography]

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Alex2007
    Who flippin' cares? The whole notion of "Cloud" computing in my opinion is one big online circle jerk. With SaaS, at best, you get a few clever gadgets and can create hosted forms and reports, but instead of paying once and being done with it as in any in-house or off-the-shelf application, you have to keep paying through the nose, by user, by month ad ad nauseam. There’s no real intelligence to SFDC in the way of predictive modeling. Sure, you can build triggers for e-mails, tasks, and data, but when you get right down to it, it’s dumber than dirt, just hosted – and expensive. Correct me if I'm wrong, but SFDC won't let you create a single user account for everyone in marketing - you have to purchase separate licenses for each person, even if they have very limited reader needs. The apps I've created using SFDC have been nice, but slower than any end-user would like. And when you attempt to create OLAP type reports with drill-down into thousands of records, it can get painfully slow to the point it's just not tolerated by end users. I was an early adopter of SFA/CRM and I can remember when Upshot.com was in superior to SFDC for access to back-end data, etc. Does SFDC even today offer a native ODBC connector? The last I checked, you had to license one from third party vendors. You would be shocked to find out how expensive it is to have SFDC perform a roll-back - even though they do daily backups (you better create your own back-ups nightly). I think SugarCRM and open source is the future of CRM/SFA. It looks like anyone with a server can play in this game. This country needs manufacturing jobs, innovations in mass transit, and an entirely new national infrastructure for water, transpo, broadband, etc. This SaaS ‘revolution’ is sheer puffery. At the rate we're going as a nation, pretty soon, we'll all share an inter-connected misery devoid of privacy, served up ads based on our psychographic profile for things we used to be able to afford when this country actually had jobs that produced things of value.
  • It was predictable since they already had partnered up with Google before as mentioned.. Nice partnership for Salesforce though as they need Google more then Google needs them --- they are in it to win it and that is good news. I like their aggressive approaches as well. A company I follow closely :)

    Mike
  • edhardy622
    British law student sues Abercrombie-Fitch for disability discrimination.
    http://www.abercrombieonsale.co.uk