The Wisdom of Clouds

In a press release Wednesday morning, Salesforce.com and Google announced the availability of Force.com for Google App Engine, a platform as a service integration that allows App Engine developers to more easily integrate their applications with data from Salesforce.com.

Force.com for Google App Engine provides developers a set of tools and services to build new kinds of Web and business applications entirely in the cloud. Instead of having to manage and maintain their own on-premise infrastructure, developers can use real-time cloud computing infrastructure from Google and Salesforce.com to develop and deploy new applications on the Web. Force.com for App Engine will accelerate the success developers have had with App Engine in building Web applications, and makes it easy for them to integrate their App Engine apps to enterprise data stored in Force.com.

According to the release, Force.com for Google App Engine provides developers with a set of Java libraries that perform actions against Force.com APIs and services. Features are reported to include:

• A SOAP-based Web service to access Force.com resources directly from App Engine.
• Java libraries for utilizing the Force.com service specifically tuned for App Engine.
• Complete documentation, getting started guides, and a sample application

With this announcement, Salesforce.com has gained a Java platform to complement its own Force.com platform, which relies on the proprietary APEX programming language. Given the high penetration of Java in the enterprise applications market, this could open significant new doors for Salesforce.com among developers.

It should also be noted that this is not the first joint deliverable between Salesforce.com and Google, with connectivity between Force.com and Google Apps being announced last month. I'm keeping an eye on the two companies, as they are increasingly building a tight partnership, and have the potential of blurring the line between their respective partner and customer communities, creating potentially the largest cloud developer platform ecosystem by far.