Dec 9, 2008 : Google App Engine Adds Salesforce

📅 December 9, 2008 - Adding another powerful application to Google's web application platform, service customer management and office software provider Salesforce.com (salesforce.com) has announced that its Force.com has now been integrated into Google's App Engine.


Announced at a company event in New York, Monday, "Force.com for Google App Engine" is a Python library and test suite for apps running on App Engine, enabling developers to easily access the Force.com Web services API, letting them build apps that manipulate and display data stored on Force.com.

A Google blog entry stated that the company is very excited about the new application, which will let users manage contacts and orders from browser helping offer customers personalized experiences and directly generate online leads.

"It's fantastic to see App Engine gaining traction in the world of enterprise software," wrote App Engine representative Pete Koomen. "Whether you want to deploy a browser-based tool to members of your organization or a personalized, customer-focused app that scales to millions of users, App Engine's ease of use and scaling power make it an ideal choice for enterprise development. With Force.com for App Engine you can now connect apps with the CRM and custom data you already store on the Force.com platform."

Chairman and chief executive officer Marc Benioff summarized the partnership into three points, "It's about integrating two tremendously powerful sets of services. It's also about using the power of both of these companies to move those services into the market. And the third thing is to build the next generation of applications."

Force.com documentation and a "Google Code" library download are currently available to developers.

Since April, Google and Salesforce have officially been planning to integrate Force.com into Google Apps, however, Google has not been the only company that has expressed an interest in working with Salesforce. Salesforce's Monday announcement echoes similar arrangements with Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service.

While still in pre-release mode, according to a TechCrunchIT report, Google's App Engine is largely geared toward developers of quickly developed and deployed, scalable online applications. Amazon's offering, on the other hand, is more mainstream, "positioned as a more generalized, flexible infrastructure platform for serving all types of programs."

E-Week has explored the obvious suggestion that Yahoo! (yahoo.com) get on the Salesforce bandwagon along with Amazon and Google.