Salesforce.com and Google take a gamble on love

Salesforce.com and Google have taken their corporate love-in one step further with a new tie-up intended to make it easier for developers in both camps to work together more easily.

Force.com for Google App Engine lets programmers draw on Force.com's enterprise-oriented features as well as on the more consumer-oriented capabilities of Google App Engine. Google App Engine apps will now be able to connect to Salesforce.com data, while Salesforce.com users will get the ability to develop Web apps in Python and take advantage of Google's authentication services. For example, a Google App Engine-based e-commerce application could be tied to order management and CRM databases running on Force.com. "We have an open vision for cloud computing," said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. "Developers now can take advantage of the easy to use and rapidly scalable cloud computing infrastructure from Google and Salesforce.com to build and deliver powerful business applications."

In practical terms what it all means is that developers on the Google App Engine platform can use the Python language to interact directly with the database, workflow and logic capabilities of Force.com, and can also tap into Force.com's support for programming user authentication, multiple langauges and currency support. Force.com developers get native access to Google services such as Bigtable distributed storage and can use Python libraries within App Engine to read and write to Force.com using the Force.com API.

Betting on The Cloud

One example of this in practice can be seen at Harrah's Entertainment which is moving key business applications to Salesforce.com's Force.com. Harrah's, which operates numerous high-profile Las Vegas casinos, including Caesar's Palace and The Rio, as well as Harrah's branded properties, plans to shift applications for managing room reservations, air travel programmes and player relations onto Force.com. It's one of the biggest deployments of Force.com to date and one of the biggest bets on cloud computing as an enterprise platform as the applications running on the platform will be mission-critical revenue-generators for Harrah's.

The applications will be used by agents based at casinos, at Harrah's 50 branch offices and by about 250 independent reps who work on behalf of the company. The new platform will allow tge reps to make room requests over the web and receive confirmations back within hours. Airline schedules will be integrated directly into Harrah's travel management system, which should make it easier for the casino operator to schedule travel for VIP guests. Previously these functions were carried out manually. Booking a room,for example, might require the field representatives to fax reservation requests to the appropriate casino and took days of back and forth manual coordination to process.

Integration firm Appirio produced a proof-of-concept Web app mashing together a slot machine game that uses Google App Engine with a site for VIP guests that's hosted by Force.com sites. The new app simply combines the two applications, and imagines that the new slot machine app could be used as a chance for VIP guests to potentially win awards like free tickets to a show. The system is connected to Salesforce CRM, so guests could be able to pick those prizes up as soon as they arrive at the hotel and Harrah's can track how well guests respond to the games.

Harrah's CIO Tim Stanley said that the Force.com platform provides more flexibility than traditional, client-server architectures have in the past. "Innovation helps us continually surprise and satisfy our customers, as well as keep us a step ahead of our competitors," he said. "We discovered how we could leverage cloud computing to develop new systems and enhance our existing capabilities that we use to run our business.

"We have been advocates and innovators with a variety of SOA, SAAS and other enabling tools, technology and platforms for years and Force.com has shown strong promise as a viable, scalable and flexible platform for several new capabilities we can envision for our business. We have now delivered several new applications that provide demonstrable benefits to our business and we are already pushing ahead into a wider array of new and enhanced capabilities including deeper integration with some of our existing CRM and transactional systems. It's been a high value and low cost initiative for us."

This is just the latest addition to the increasingly close relationship between Google and Salesforce.com. In 2006, the two companies announced the integration of Google AdWords and Salesforce CRM; more than 10,000 customers use Salesforce for Google App Engine today. In April, they linked Salesforce's CRM software with Google Apps while in June Salesforce.com created the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs, allowing developers to connect to data in Google Apps via the Force.com development platform. Half of the top 10 applications on Salesforce.com's App Exchange are for Google Apps.

For more stories on Google and Salesforce.com's alliance, check out these articles at MyCustomer.com: