Salesforce.com and Google are set to announce that they are linking up their cloud platforms, Force.com and App Engine, respectively. The idea is that the integration will enable developers to build applications that take the best from both worlds: App Engine’s gaming and social networking tools together with Force.com’s business- and customer-savviness.
According to eWeek’s Clint Boulton, Salesforce.com is already showing off one result from the move, an application from Harrah’s Entertainment that combines code from a slot-machine gaming application built on App Engine integrated with a customer loyalty database built on Force.com. The new app lets gaming users who qualify sign up for an event, and then lets Harrah’s sales reps see that information the next time they view that user’s information in the database. Pretty cool.
While both companies say they don’t view the integration as a real money-maker, they do see it as a way to stimulate developers to build new categories of mash-up applications. As Boulton explains:
Neither Salesforce.com nor Google stands to make a lot of money from this type of venture. Rather, the effort is about bridging the work of two distinct developer camps. Who knows where this will lead in the future? It’s impossible to say now.
Following on the heels of Salesforce.com’s announcement of a similar linkage between Force.com and Amazon’s Amazon Web Services, the move highlights the importance of linking up disparate cloud computing infrastructures to make cloud-based applications easier to use and more feature-rich. Maybe deals like this are just the thing to get cloud-based computing a bit higher up on the adoption curve.
