cloud

Salesforce extends Google link with new toolkit

Salesforce.com is furthering its alliance with Google through a new toolkit that lets developers tap into Google's services.

The two companies inked an initial deal in April to link Salesforce's CRM (customer relationship management) applications with integrated Google Apps.

On Monday, Salesforce.com said it has launched the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs, which will let developers using its Force.com development platform connect to data in Google Apps.

Force.com is Salesforce.com's cloud computing service for building hosted Web applications.

The companies envision that the toolkit will pave the way for new … Read more

SoundCloud is one of the coolest music apps around (invites)

SoundCloud is a service for musicians to distribute their music to one another, and eventually the public. It's not a marketplace like iTunes or Amazon though; instead it's a sharing network for musicians looking to hock their demos and get feedback on early tracks. You might be saying to yourself "doesn't MySpace do all that?" Well sort of, but the big difference is that SoundCloud is its own social network and offers more control over where tracks go as well as what bits of metadata come along for the ride.

The entire experience revolves around … Read more

SugarCRM moves 30 percent of its customers to the cloud

I mentioned earlier this week that SaaS may well offer open-source vendors a way to write lots of free software, and still get paid. John Roberts, CEO of SugarCRM, underscores this possibility by noting that 30 percent of SugarCRM deployments are hosted, rather than on premise, as The VAR Guy notes. I talked with John a year or so ago and that number was closer to 10 percent back then.

Clearly, the "cloud" is growing for SugarCRM as more customers swap "bits" for service.

Intriguingly, the web is going in the reverse direction, increasingly opening up its underlying code. … Read more

What happens if your 'cloud' fails?

For all the benefits of "the cloud," there are two primary problems:

Lock-in to the platform. Where are you going to go with your application once you've written it for a particular cloud platform? Some promise portability, but it's still a question worth asking. You're at the mercy of someone else for uptime.

This second item has always seemed like less of an issue given that the companies involved (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) are all fantastic at operations. Surely they can do better than you or I could?

With Google's AppEngine going down yesterday, … Read more

Google App Engine suffers outages

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started … Read more

Google Docs gets limited PDF support

Google Docs, the online office suite from the search giant, now has some limited but still useful support for PDF files.

People using the service now can upload and view documents encoded with the widely used and now standardized Portable Document Format initially created by Adobe Systems. People also can transfer PDFs stored on the Web. (Look below for a screenshot showing the two-pane PDF view.)

The move, announced on the Google Docs blog Friday, isn't much of a surprise. In addition to the fact that it makes eminent sense, close observers already had begun seeing signs that hinted … Read more

Google's right, but cloud computing's timeline isn't so clear

Earlier Tuesday, a Google executive by the name of Rishi Chandra made the argument that the move to cloud computing was just a matter of time.

""The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away, but there is a transition taking place," he said during a conference taking place in Boston.

I don't know whether it will be 10 years or not, but that's the trend. Nobody still seriously argues that it won't be easier to run word processors or spreadsheets off a central … Read more

Daily Debrief: Handicapping the cloud computing transition

Amazon may have had its ups and downs lately, but Google is still brimming with confidence about the future course of enterprise computing on the Web. Earlier Tuesday, a Google exec by the name of Rishi Chandra went on record predicting that the move to cloud computing is no longer a matter of when but a question of how long it will take to speed the transition.

Check out my interview with News.com's Stephen Shankland on Tuesday's Daily Debrief. Shankland offers some interesting context to Chandra's remarks.

Mark Lucovsky visits the Gillmor Gang

This week's Friday Gillmor Gang podcast featured Mark Lucovsky, currently head of Google's search APIs and formerly a top technologist at Microsoft (reportedly Steve Ballmer threw a chair across the room upon being informed that Lucovsky was getting hitched to Google).

Lucovsky talked about making Google's APIs available to developers. The APIs include high-speed access to Google search via Javascript and RESTful protocols, peer APIs about accessing APIs, language APIs for detecting languages and translations, and hosting of third-party open Javascript libraries, such as Mootools.

"We are opening up all of Google bit-by-bit programmatically," Lucovsky … Read more