Google, Salesforce.com Say Theyre Still Tight

eWEEK asked both Salesforce.com and Google whether Salesforce.com was invited to join the Marketplace, but neither directly answered the question.

A Google spokesperson told eWEEK, "We'd welcome Salesforce's participation in the Marketplace but can't speak on their behalf regarding their plans."

Sean Whitely, vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com, e-mailed this statement to eWEEK: "Our customers have always been our number one priority and they drive our product roadmap. As new services and products come out, we look to our customers to determine what we should support. Based on today's announcement from Google, we will be looking to our customers for guidance."

That's not a no, but not a yes. Webster further questioned whether or not Google and Salesforce.com's much-publicized integrations are bearing any fruit. 

A Google spokesperson stressed that Google Apps and Salesforce.com are certainly still integrated, and that this integration proved to Google that the Marketplace would work.

The spokesperson further noted that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was a featured speaker at Google's Atmosphere cloud event in London last October.    

It's all well and good that Google thinks its Marketplace can work in the wake of its successful interoperability with Salesforce.com, but it's not without its challenges.

Google lets developers access the Marketplace through single sign-on courtesy of OpenID, while customers access the apps through OAuth. Group policy management will be a tough task, Schadler told eWEEK.

"Salesforce.com is a specialty app, and you limit who accesses to it, but e-mail is universal," Schadler said. "You have to have controls in place to make sure that the people that should get the apps get it, but those that don't aren't accessing it. There is a fair amount of group policy management."

Schadler also wants to know what Microsoft is going to do regarding the App Store. "They're going to have to respond here," he said. 

That's another story for another time. Stay tuned. The year 2010 may be the first real year of the cloud computing platform wars.