Seeding the cloud

One of the biggest problems with Google Apps is that true enterprise users are few and far between. So how do you change that? By taking a page from Microsoft's playbook--at least that's how Google Watch's Clint Boulton sees it.

Yesterday, Salesforce.com and Google announced they were going even further in integrating their respective cloud computing platforms by offering a toolkit for programmers that lets them take data from Google Apps and use it within Salesforce.com databases, logic and workflows. This is in addition to last April's announcement that Salesforce.com users could use Google Apps, like Gmail, Google Talk and Google Docs, without leaving their Saleforce.com GUI.

The upshot? Boulton quotes Ariel Kelman, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce.com, saying that the new Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs lets programmers build apps that read and write information between the Salesforce.com database and Google Apps. By making such links easier to build, the two vendors hope to increase the number of developers willing to build applications that run in the cloud. Kelman likened it to the days when Microsoft partnered with SAP and Business Objects in business intelligence to bolster on-premises software.

It's an interesting idea, especially if you extrapolate beyond Salesforce.com. Google could end up partnering with other vendors (think Adobe, Apple) in various cloud-computing endeavors. And with each partnership, it could end up bolstering the functionality and overall acceptance of cloud computing, making it far more palatable to the average enterprise user. It's sort of like out-Microsofting Microsoft.