Google, Salesforce Expand Integration Of Cloud Computing Platforms

Salesforce.com on Monday introduced a toolkit that makes it possible to take content from Google services and integrate it with Salesforce's database, logic, and workflow capabilities.

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs is the latest technology from the partners, which in April unveiled Salesforce for Google Apps. The latter combined Google's e-mail, document, instant communications, and spreadsheet apps with Salesforce's applications environment, so users could access any of the tools within the same window.

Force.com is Salesforce's platform for building applications that run on the vendor's cloud computing platform. The new toolkit provides direct access to Google's data application programming interfaces directly within Salesforce's Apex programming language, simplifying the development process. The toolkit allows developers to build things like sales-quote generation and business-forecasting applications by integrating customer and sales data from Salesforce with Google's spreadsheet application.

Salesforce says there's customer demand for combining services from the two companies. Six of the top 10 applications available through AppExchange include Google applications, Salesforce said. AppExchange is Salesforce's online store for third-party software.

An example of Web applications built by combining Google and Salesforce services is CODA 2go, developed on the Force.com platform. Built by financial software maker CODA, the application prototype takes data from Google spreadsheets and brings it into the order-to-cash module of CODA 2go.

Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs is available at no charge through Salesforce and Google. Applications can be published on either the Google section of AppExchange or on the search engine's Solutions Marketplace.

The Salesforce-Google collaboration started about a year ago when the companies linked Google AdWords to Salesforce. A half-million businesses use Google Apps, and up to 200 large companies, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, are testing the software.