Google Salesforce and Google Wave
Francis Turner
May 28th, 2009
The Google IO conference is providing a host of interesting announcements. One that is currently getting a good deal of coverage is “Google Wave“. Of course we have to see what actually shows up but what it looks like is a bunch of snazzy Web2.0 AJAXy (with added HTML 5!!!) frontends and tools to a wiki. This is not necessarily a bad thing - wikis tend to be somewhat idiosyncratic and also very poor at handling anything other than raw text - but a jazzed up Wiki doesn’t sound quite as revolutionary as perhaps Google would like us to think Wave is.
On the other hand the announcement of SaaS/cloud interoperability between Google and Salesforce.com, which doesn’t sound particularly novel, may in fact be truly revolutionary for the users. By combining the clouds it becomes possible to write applications that use numerous Google tools and utilities (including I suppose Google Wave) and access the business data in Salesforce.com. This sort of integration may end up having a signficant effect on the business world at large because it permits even very small companies to have the seamless IT backend that hitherto have required large MIS organizations and have therefore only been possible for large enterprises. Indeed many large organizations have problems integrating customer facing sales and support data/applications with internal ones so it is possible that this integration may actually tip the balance in favor of smaller nimbler companies.
The one downside I can see with this integration is that it potentially leads to worse security breaches because a poorly written google API app could now expose all the salesforce.com data to an infiltrator. This, on the other hand, is something that the Wave team seem to have thought about since Wave will, we are told, not be tied to Google’s servers and can in fact be installed inside the company firewall.
Tags: google, saas, salesforce.com, wave, web2.0