Multi-cloud application development made easier

Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Partner Programs Manager

As the number of great SaaS-based business applications increases, its becoming easier for companies of all sizes to run their entire business in the cloud (or even across clouds). The canonical example of this is the recent release of Salesforce for Google Apps, a deep integration of salesforce.com's CRM solution and the Google Apps suite of communication and collaboration tools. We're happy to see a growing number of enterprise and commercial developers working in the cloud and building applications that jointly leverage Google's open APIs and salesforce.com's Force.com Platform-as-a-Service. Solution providers and independent software vendors (ISVs) like CODA, Appirio, Astadia, and VerticalResponse have all also recently built innovative applications leveraging this multi-cloud application architecture.

Today, this type of multi-cloud development is getting easier as salesforce.com is making freely available the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs. This toolkit helps developers of Force.com projects easily and securely access data from Google Apps in order to create new business applications or extend Salesforce for Google Apps. Specifically, developers can now read and write spreadsheet cells, calendar events, documents, and contacts as if they were native to the Force.com platform.

On Monday, salesforce.com's Tour de Force event series is circling back to Silicon Valley for a free conference where developers can learn more about the how and why to build enterprise web applications at the intersection of Force.com and Google's open APIs using this new toolkit. There will be exciting technical and business focused tracks with sessions led by both salesforce.com and Google as well as opportunities to get practical hands-on training from experts from both companies.