"And Together We Form Voltron" (or "How to Connect the Cloud")

The 80's cartoon Lion Force Voltron featured a team of five pilots commanding five robot lions, which could be combined together to form Voltron, a powerful do-gooder whose whole was greater than the sum of his parts. At the Cloud Connect event last week a bunch of developers came together to create our own cloud version of Voltron by combining cloud services from Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.com to create applications that could do good for businesses and consumers.

The event started with Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager for Google Apps, making the case for why businesses should move their IT systems to the cloud to a panel of CIOs. Check out his presentation and leave a YouTube comment to let us know if you're convinced.

During the second day to we ran 30 or so developer-to-developer training sessions where we had Google engineers instruct on implementing Google App Engine, and GData and Google Maps APIs with the hope that they'd use our services when building their cloud-based apps.

And on the evening of the third day, we didn't boil the oceans, but coding teams did create some pretty sweet apps using only cloud services. One of the cooler ones was an socially-aware job search app for the iPhone which used Google App Engine, and Facebook and Google Apps APIs. Check out developer Claes Nygren's demo:

Cloud Connect did a great job of testing the ease of interoperability and data portability between cloud computing providers. We want companies to be able to use the best services for their needs across multiple providers, and ensure that we are more flexible than traditional on-premise software platforms.

There are two new ways that you too can play with robot action figures – I mean Google code. Test your app ideas in real-time at the new AJAX APIs Playground. Or register for Google I/O, Google's largest developer gathering, coming to San Francisco, CA from May 28 - 29, 2009.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Apps Team