Oracle made several announcements on April 7 centered on products designed to interact with Google Apps, including Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps with support for Google SDC.

Google marked the first birthday of the Google App Engine cloud computing solution at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, offering newly added Java support for the Google App Engine platform along with additional features including a database import tool and the Google Secure Data Connector, a development tool for building applications that give users access to secure corporate data even when they are working with Google Apps outside the firewall.

In addition to Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps supporting Google SDC, Oracle is rolling out Siebel CRM support for Google Apps and Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps.

Oracle Gadget Wizard for Google Apps allows users to construct gadgets without prior programming knowledge. These gadgets can make use of Oracle CRM.

The Siebel CRM applications utilize the Google SDC to interact with the cloud in a secure and flexible way, allowing for SAAS (software as a service) applications that can access corporate data behind the enterprise firewall, Oracle said in a news release.

Siebel CRM support of the Google Secure Data Connector "provides customers choice by helping seamlessly integrate existing [on-premises] investments with on-demand services," according to the company.

"There's an opportunity now to provide miniapplications or even applications that can be based, in part or in whole, on using Siebel CRM," Mark Woollen, vice president of Social CRM for Oracle, said in an interview. "You can take the code you built on middleware and port it directly to the Google App Engine. From there you can run it up into the cloud and use Google Apps accounts to get at the data behind the firewall."

With the new solutions in place, a brand owner could provide a gadget for deal registration, for example, sparing channel sales people from having to visit a company portal; instead, a salesperson could log on to a secure Google site to review and accept leads, interacting with the cloud without exposing the company's data in an insecure way.

Oracle has been updating or rolling out a number of new solutions as of late. On April 7, the company announced Oracle Transportation Management 6.0, a solution that provides improved oversight for transportation networks, the first update since Version 5.5 in May 2006.

And in March 2009, Oracle released Oracle Sourcing on Demand, a SAAS solution designed to make enterprise procurement of supplies a more efficient and cost-effective process by letting a company's experts collaborate online.