Heute sind wir zum Ersten Mal von einem unserer höheneren Hausberge, der Rax geflogen. Es war ein außergewöhnlich milder Novembertag, auf der Rax kaum Schnee. Ein Auto haben wir in Altenberg am Ortsende bei der Landewiese geparkt, das andere beim Gasthof Moassa, von wo wir in etwa zwei Stunden über die Karreralm zum Gamseck aufgestiegen sind. Der Nord-Wind indem die Vögel beim Gamseck bei unserer ankunft noch gesoart sind, hat dann stark nachgelassen, sodass ein Klippenstart am Gamseck nicht mehr möglich war. Stattdessen legten wir an den flacheren westhängen aus und starteten sprintend mit leichtem Rückenwind in den Sonnenuntergang.

Resumee: Ein sehr angenehmer aufstieg für Hike&Fly Rookies wie uns, da nur 700 HM zu überwinden sind. Aufstieg und Flug in der hochalpinen und einsamen Landschaft der Rax sind ein besonderes Erlebnis und bieten mehr als Flüge überlaufenen Spots. Natürlich mit den bekannten Nachteilen: man hat maximal eine Flugchane, mglw muss man alles zu Fuß wieder hinuntergehen. Und die Bergsteigerweisheit “am Vormittag gehen, zu Mittag oben sein” hat sich auch hier bewahrheitet. Wären wir etwa 1h früher am Gipfel gewesen hätten wir uns im Hangwind wahrscheinlich länger halten können. So war ein äußerst kurzer abgleiter – in 8minuten 1050 HM vernichtet.

Weitere Fotos

Forumsbeitrag

These are this morning’s top analyst upgrades, downgrades, and initiations seen early this Tuesday morning from Wall Street research calls:

Adobe Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBE) Raised to Buy at Janney Montgomery Scott.
Central Euro Media Enterprises Ltd. (NASDAQ: CETV) Raised to Buy at Goldman Sachs.
Energy Conversion Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: ENER) Cut to Sell at Citigroup; Cut to Neutral at JPMorgan; Cut to Hold at Lazard.
GT Solar International, Inc. (NASDAQ: SOLR) Cut to Underweight at Piper Jaffray.
Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR) Raised to Conviction Buy List at Goldman Sachs.
Polo Ralph Lauren Corp. (NYSE: RL) Raised to Conviction Buy List at Goldman Sachs.
Rackspace Hosting, Inc. (NYSE: RAX) Raised to Outperform at Oppenheimer; Raised to Buy at Kaufman
Sequenom Inc. (NASDAQ: SQNM) Maintained Sell and $3 target at Auriga.

You can join our open email distribution list to get updates on top analyst upgrades and downgrades, top day trader alerts, IPO’s, secondary offerings, Warren Buffett and other guru activity, M&A and more.

JON C. OGG

[qi:004] T-Mobile service experienced a hiccup yesterday evening that left some 2 million users without service, and the usual rush of tweets and news stories followed the outage. On Monday night Rackspace (s RAX), which provides managed hosting and cloud services, also experienced problems that took some customers out for hours. The interesting things here are the difference in how both firms handled it and how much publicity each event garnered.

As of last count, a Google search returned more than 250 articles dealing with the T-Mobile outage while there were only 11 articles on Rackspace’s outage, even though it affected popular sites like TechCrunch, Daily Booth and Posterous. The higher visibility of the T-Mobile outage is likely a result of how consumer-oriented the service is. So the first lesson is, if you are a consumer-facing service, you need to have your PR people on the blog, Twitter, newspaper circuit offering statements and remedies quickly.

The second lesson can be found in how the events were handled. When it came to handling the outage, T-Mobile issued fairly regular updates but hasn’t yet provided any insight into what happened. In an age of transparency, this doesn’t go over well. Meanwhile, Rackspace has a very detailed status page that offers actual information on what went wrong and what it’s doing to fix it. Additionally, Rackspace offered actual people for its customers to call.

Other enterprise-focused services should take a lesson from Rackspace, especially when it comes to delivering cloud services. Take Google for instance; during a July App Engine platform outage, I got several emails from people who were frustrated that Google didn’t give them much information on the problem. One of those emails (I’m keeping the person’s name out of this as he is dependent on Google to host some of his information) noted: “I think the time is appropriate for a real critique of the offering, and force them to answer publicly about what they’re doing to fix whatever architectural flaw is knocking the service down every 2 or 3 weeks.”

Google’s stoplight metric (which offers only “no issues, investigating or service disruption”), paired with intermittent, vague blog posts, isn’t likely to cut it for long. If Google wants to play in the enterprise with its cloud platforms and services, it’s going to have to have people on hand to offer real customer service (something I’m not sure Google ever does — although, when Om complained about Gmail, a media relations person did get us someone on the phone) and provide better updates.

Last week, I chatted with Steven Cakebread, the former CFO of Saleforce.com, about service level agreements for demand computing and platforms as a service for the enterprise. In our conversation, he said that, until there’s more competition, Google and Amazon won’t have a huge incentive to explain outages in detail or get people on the job of explaining and holding customer’s hands during outages. So I suppose it’s a good thing IBM, Savvis, Rackspace, Terremark and others are all crowding into this space.

These are this Thursday morning’s top 10 Wall Street research calls we have seen in the land of upgrades, downgrades, and initiations:

Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE) Raised to Outperform at RW Baird.
Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM) Cut to Neutral at RW Baird.
eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) Raised to Buy at Kaufman Bros.
Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) Started as Buy at Deutsche Bank.
L-3 Communications (NYSE: LLL) Cut to Conviction Sell List from Neutral at Goldman Sachs.
Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) Started as Buy at Deutsche Bank.
Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW) Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan.
Mosaic (NYSE: MOS) Started as Outperform at RBC.
Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) Raised to Buy at Goldman Sachs.
Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) Started as Sell at UBS.

This top ten includes only some of the top financial sector analyst calls we saw this morning, where many “SELL” ratings were handed out.  You can join our open email distribution list to get updates each morning on analyst upgrades and downgrades, top day trader alerts, IPO’s and secondary offerings, Warren Buffett and other guru activity, M&A and more.

Jon C. Ogg
October 8, 2009

Sunday

Today I’ve been blessed with church and having Dave Stones come and tell us about C.B.C. (Cincinatti Bible Colledge) He’s real nice and I’m blessed by that. He said that we’ve givin the most money to them and have supported them and I blessed by that.

I’m blessed 3 times today. Tasha L. Thomas

I’m also blessed with getting to eat at Rax ’cause it’s my 2nd favorite restoraunt.

Tasha L. Thomas

These are this morning’s top analyst upgrades and positive research calls seen from Wall Street analysts early this Thursday morning:

Accenture (ACN) Started as Outperform at Baird.
Anadarko Petroleum (APC) Raised to Outperform at FBR.
Apple (AAPL) Started as Outperform at William Blair.
Cubic (CUB) Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan.
International Rectifier (IRF) Started as Buy at Merriman Curhan Ford.
Nanometrics (NANO) Started as Overweight at Piper Jaffray.
Perot Systems (PER) Started as Outperform at Baird.
Rackspace (RAX) Started as Buy at ThinkEquity.
Zumiez (ZUMZ) Raised to Outperform at William Blair.

If you wish to be notified by email when the top analyst calls hit, along with each morning’s top day trader alerts, along with news of IPO’s, key offerings, guru investor data on Buffett and others, mergers, and more, you can join our open email distribution list which goes out several times per week.

Jon C. Ogg

Rackspace has recently launched a community portal called Cloud Tools, showcasing third-party tools that support Rackspace’s cloud compute and storage services. The tools are divided into “featured” and “community”. Featured tools are ones that Rackspace has looked at and believes deserve highlighting; they’re not necessarily commercial projects, but Rackspace does have formal relationships with the developers. Community tools are fro any random joe out there who’d like to be listed. The featured tools get a lot more bells and whistles.

While this is a good move for Rackspace, it’s not ground-breaking stuff, although the portal is notable for a design that seems more consumer-friendly (by contrast with Amazon’s highly text-dense, spartan partner listings). Rather, what’s interesting is Rackspace’s ongoing (successful) efforts to encourage an ecosystem to develop around its cloud APIs, and the broader question of cloud API standardization, “de facto” standards, and similar issues.

There are no small number of cloud advocates out there that believe that rapid standardization in the industry would be advantageous, and that Amazon’s S3 and EC2 APIs, as the APIs with the greatest current adoption and broadest tools support, should be adopted as a de facto standard. Indeed, some cloud-enablement packages, like Eucalyptus, have adopted Amazon’s APIs — and will probably run into API dilemmas as they evolve, as private cloud implementations will be different than public ones, leading to inherent API differences, and a commitment to API compatibility means that you don’t fully control your own feature roadmap. There’s something to be said for compatibility, certainly. Compatibility drives commoditization, which would theoretically lower prices and deliver benefits to end-users.

However, I believe that it’s too early in the market to seek commoditization. Universal commitment to a particular API at this point clamps standardized functionality within a least-common-denominator range, and it restricts the implementation possibilities, to the detriment of innovation. As long as there is rapid innovation and the market continues to offer a slew of new features — something which I anticipate will continue at least through the end of 2011 and likely beyond — standardization is going to be of highly limited benefit.

Rackspace’s API is different than Amazon’s because Rackspace has taken some different fundamental approaches, especially with regard to the network. For another example of significant API differences, compare EMC’s Atmos API to Amazon’s S3 API. Storage is a pretty simple thing, but there are nevertheless meaningful differences in the APIs, reflecting EMC’s different philosophy and approach. (As a sideline, you might find William Vambenepe’s comparison of public cloud APIs in the context of REST, to be an interesting read.)

Everyone can agree on a certain set of core cloud concepts, and I expect that we’ll see libraries that provide unified API access to different underlying clouds; for instance, libcloud (for Python) is the beginning of one such effort. And, of course, third parties like RightScale specialize in providing unified interfaces to multiple clouds.

One thing to keep in mind: Most of the cloud APIs to date are really easy to work with. This means that if you have a tool that supports one API, it’s not terribly hard or time-consuming to make it support another API, assuming that you’re confining yourself to basic functionality.

There’s certainly something to be said in favor of other cloud providers offering an API compatibility layer for basic EC2 and S3 functionality, to satisfy customer demand for such. This also seems to be the kind of thing that’s readily executed as a third-party library, though.

Amazon (s amzn) last night announced it Virtual Private Cloud service, essentially giving enterprise customers worried about security and control in the cloud a salve to get them to trust it. The offering provides access to Amazon’s web services through a virtual private network, which is basically a secure tunnel through the Internet from a corporate network to Amazon’s servers. It’s like having a private line to Amazon’s cloud as opposed to a party line.

The virtual part of this announcement is key. The Amazon offering isn’t a pledge to put all of your data on a physically separate system — it’s all secluded at the network level using the virtual private network. So the information in Amazon’s cloud will still be shared with other companies’ data on the actual servers. By doing this, Amazon is trying to preserve the benefits of sharing fully utilized servers in a true cloud that can scale, but still provide enterprise customers with a peace of mind that they can lock down some of that data, at least while it travels to the cloud. Amazon is trying to offer the economic benefits of cloud computing in a palatable format for businesses that are weighing whether or not they should try to build their own in-house cloud infrastructures. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explains in his blog:

These CIOs know that what is sometimes dubbed “private cloud” does not meet their goal as it does not give them the benefits of the cloud: true elasticity and capex elimination. Virtualization and increased automation may give them some improvements in utilization, but they would still be holding the capital, and the operational cost would still be significantly higher.

With this announcement, Amazon is trying to get a jump on it competitors that are gunning for corporate customers. While many big businesses have used Amazon Web Services, most perceive it as being insufficiently secure for important or confidential data. Companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Rackspace are trying to find the right mix of scale and security for enterprise clients. Microsoft (s msft) is building its own platform and infrastructure-as-a-service offering called Azure; IBM is creating several gradations of a private cloud from something deployed inside a corporation’s own data center to a service delivered from Big Blue’s data center; and Rackspace (s rax) is hoping security-minded customers use its dedicated hosting that can scale up to the Rackspace cloud.

Michael Crandell, CEO of Rightscale, which provides cloud management software, tried to explain a bit more what Amazon is trying to do with the Virtual Private Cloud, which, by the way, costs an extra 5 cents an hour per VPN:

Something that initially puzzled me is what the benefits of a VPC are when all the marketing fluff dissipates. Here is what I’ve learned. First, instances in the VPC are separated from non-VPC instances at a deeper network level than instances in different security groups or belonging to different users. As is typical, Amazon doesn’t say anything of substance about the nature of this isolation. Let’s see how soon that will have to change to actually attract enterprises…Second, instances in the VPC can seamlessly integrate into a company’s internal network routing. This is significant because it means that tools used to inventory, secure, audit, manage and access all servers in the IT infrastructure can now be brought to bear on instances in the cloud as well.

The Amazon offering is different from IBM and Microsoft’s efforts in that it provides access to the raw infrastructure, rather than a service. Both Microsoft and IBM, especially Big Blue, are betting that enterprises will demand services, such as IBM’s workload specific offerings delivered from a cloud, or Microsoft’s SQL Azure, rather than access to the raw infrastructure. In the next few years, more enterprise computing jobs will shift to some of these companies, and by creating a Virtual Private Cloud offering, Amazon makes sure it stays relevant and can get a slice of the enterprise pie. The question will be whether or not businesses find Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud private enough.

Interesting recent news:

Amazon’s revocation of Orwell novels on the Kindle has stirred up some cloud debate. There seems to have been a thread of “will this controversy kill cloud computing”, which you can find in plenty of blogs and press articles. I think that question, in this context, is silly, and am not going to dignify it with a lengthy post of my own. I do think, however, that it highlights important questions around content ownership, application ownership, and data ownership, and the role that contracts (whether in the form of EULAs or traditional contracts) will play in the cloud. By giving up control over physical assets, whether data or devices, we place ourselves into the hands of thir parties, and we’re now subject to their policies and foibles. The transition from a world of ownership to a world of rental, even “permanent” lifetime rental, is not a trivial one.

Engine Yard has expanded its EC2 offering. Previously, Engine Yard was offering Amazon EC2 deployment of its stack via an offering called Solo, for low-end customers who only needed a single instance. Now, they’ve introduced a version called Flex, which is oriented around customers who need a cluster and associated capabilities, along with a higher level of support. This is notable because Engine Yard has been serving these higher-end customers out of their own data center and infrastructure. This move, however, seems to be consistent with Engine Yard’s gradual shift from hosting towards being more software-centric.

The Rackspace Cloud Servers API is now in open beta. Cloud Servers is essentially the product that resulted from Rackspace’s acquisition of Slicehost. Previously, you dealt with your Cloud Server through a Web portal; this new release adds a RESTful API, along with some new features, like shared IPs (useful for keepalived and the like). Also of note is the resize operation, letting you scale your server size up or down, but this is really handwaving magic in front of replacing a smaller virtual server with a larger virtual server, rather than expanding an already-running virtual instance. The API is fairly extensive and the documentation seems decent, although I haven’t had time to personally try it out yet. The API responses, interestingly, include both human-readable data as well as WADL (Web Application Description Language, which is machine-parseable).

SOASTA has introduced a cloud-based performance certification program. Certification is something of a marketing gimmick, but I do think that SOASTA is, overally, an interesting company. Very simply, SOASTA leverages cloud system infrastructure to offer high-volume load-testing services. In the past, you’d typically execute such tests using a tool like HP’s LoadRunner, and many Web hosters offer, as part of their professional services offerings, performance testing using LoadRunner or a similar tool. SOASTA is a full-fledged software as a service offering (i.e., it is their own test harness, monitors, analytics, etc., not a cloud repackaging of another vendor), and the price point makes it reasonable not just for the sort of well-established organizations that could previously afford commercial performance-testing tools, but also for start-ups.

Rackspace (s rax) said today that it will release the APIs for its Cloud Servers product, which provides on-demand, per-instance-based computing. Releasing the APIs means a variety of companies — such as RightScale — will be able to build products and development platforms using Rackspace’s cloud without going through its control panel to manually allocate the necessary servers. This helps bring Cloud Servers, which Rackspace acquired through its purchase of Slicehost last year, into the same league as Amazon’s (s amzn) EC2, which already allows developers to build platforms and management products on Amazon’s cloud through its own APIs.

Emil Sayegh, general manager of the Rackspace Cloud, says the company plans plants to add more features to its cloud products over the next few weeks, such as backing up information to Cloud Files (the Rackspace storage cloud) automatically, and Windows in the cloud. These are both features Amazon Web Services already has. Saygegh also says Rackspace plans to release its API to the open source community, which may speed the development of an open API for building programs on cloud platforms.

These are this Monday’s top pre-market analyst downgrades and cautious research calls from Wall Street with more than two hours until the market opens:

Citrix Systems (CTXS) Cut to Perform at Oppenheimer.
Discovery Labs (DSCO) Cut to Underperform at Jefferies.
Eaton Vance (EV) Cut to Underweight at JPMorgan.
Federated Investors (FII) Cut to Underweight at JPMorgan.
FPL Group (FPL) Cut to Underperform at Credit Suisse.
Rackspace (RAX) Cut to Neutral at Goldman Sachs.

JON C. OGG

I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction circa 1940’s-50’s and I’ve been really really soaking it in on all sorts of levels (as you can see below it has seeped into my cartoon-ish aesthetic). I never really knew that I even liked sci-fi literature until I picked up these last three:

Rax, Michael Coney
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

They are all incredible books and I’m surprised that they are really considered sci-fi because they run so deep on so many levels. They are truly great pieces of literature, and aren’t at all dated by the era that they were written. I used to assume that most science fiction consisted of silly outdated predictions of the future, or outlandish ideas of what humans and earth and aliens would be like, but instead I’ve discovered a whole world of books that are strange little head-trips about life itself and are truly moving and eerie. Definitely not consisting of the classic and cliche post-apocolyptic water-world trashed New York scenery that I thought most sci-fi books were about. What a great discovery!

And here is a poster of the next Dabbers show at the Soda Bar to go along with this new exciting theme…

We will have some changes or further additions and deletions coming today from Russell for the highly awaited Russell rebalance and reconstitution taking place late this month.  What is interesting about the group’s additions and deletions is that there are many of the hot (and not so hot) companies which came public via an IPO that are in the Russell index changes.

Bridgepoint Education Inc. (NYSE: BPI) is being added to Russell 3000 and to the Russell Global.  DigitalGlobal Inc. (NYSE: DGI) is actually trading as a busted IPO and it is being added to Russell 3000 and to the Russell Global.  OpenTable (NASDAQ: OPEN) is being added to Russell 3000 and to the Russell Global.  Rosetta Stone Inc. (NYSE: RST) is being added to Russell 3000 and to the Russell Global.  RHI Entertainment (NASDAQ: RHIE) was a distant IPO but it is being added to Russell 3000 and to the Russell Global.  SolarWinds Inc. (NYSE: SWI) is a very fresh IPO and is being added to Russell 3000 and to the Russell Global.  There is also a list of other key IPOs which were not included for certain issues.

Changyou.com Limited (NASDAQ: CYOU) was not listed in the first preliminary list for the Russell 3000 but that could be from an ADR status, the percentage of the free float to total shares, and the recent spin-off.  Grand Canyon Education (NASDAQ: LOPE) was not listed on the preliminary list, and that may be a free float issue versus total shares.  Mead Johnson Nutrition Co. (NYSE: MJN) was also not on the Russell 3000 preliminary list, but that may be an issue over the total float and spin-off. RackSpace Hosting Inc. (NYSE: RAX) was not on the initial list.

As noted with the speculative energy stocks getting booted off the list, there will be changes and adjustments announced today and next Friday before the final-final lists are posted on Monday June 29, 2009.

Jon C. Ogg
June 19, 2009

Salesforce.com (s crm) is trying to entice developers working inside the enterprise to its platform-as-a-service product by offering them a free first taste of Force.com. The platform is built on Salesforce.com’s own infrastructure that it cobbled together to deliver its CRM software as a service. It looks like Salesforce.com’s  goal with Force.com is to create an enterprise platform-as-a-service offering that rivals Google’s (s Goog)  App Engine, or eventually Microsoft’s (s msft) Azure. The battle that was fought last year over infrastructure as a service, where Rackspace (s rax), Amazon (s amzn) and GoGrid were fighting to provide bare-bones cloud computing, is now moving up the stack as cloud vendors realize that plenty of IT departments are thinking about using some form of cloud computing, but may not want to trouble with thinking about the hardware layer.

The company today announced a free edition of Force.com so developers can build one app for up to 100 people, that uses up to 10 custom objects (custom database tables) per user and a web site that gets fewer than 250,000 page views per month. That last bit brings us to today’s second announcement: Force.com Sites.

The offering looks like an amped-up GeoCities for enterprises that allows corporate IT departments to build an internal or public-facing web site, while still tying it into permissions and data available to Force.com. There are three pricing levels, from free (which lets a site owner have up to 250,000 page views) to unlimited (which, despite the name, is limited to 1 million monthly page views.) Additional monthly page views are available for $1,000 per month for up to 1 million more monthly page views.

Given that each different platform as a service is built to optimize the host’s underlying hardware and architecture, several of them will likely proliferate in the spirit of co-opetition. Google, for example, emphasizes that App Engine is designed for apps that need to scale, while Salesforce.com emphasizes its familiarity with the enterprise and permissions around accessing data. Microsoft has said it plans to integrate Azure deeply into its suite of products, which will help developers customize their Microsoft apps. Expect to see more news about these efforts and more agreements to make sure data and permissions can be shared between them in the coming months.

Cloud services, such as Microsoft’s (s msft) Azure platform, will be less profitable for the company than its software sales, said Ray Ozzie, Redmond’s chief software architect. He said the same thing back in a March 2008 interview with Om as well. Ozzie made his latest comments at an event in Silicon Valley on Thursday, adding that while cloud computing had lower margins, it would result in increased sales.

“The margins at the low level, at the Azure level, are going to be lower than the top level, where you’re delivering a solution or something like Exchange,” said Ozzie, referring to Microsoft’s popular e-mail and calendar application. “You’re pricing that solution around a business value more than cost so the margins are still very, very good.”

I wrote last month about how Microsoft can boost profits if it delivers higher-value services on top of its Azure cloud. The desire for higher margins is why IBM (s ibm) has said it’s less interested in providing the type of infrastructure as a service that Amazon (s amzn) or Rackspace (s rax) do, but is eager to deliver services that run on top of the computing clouds. It’s also why vendors such as CSC and even Rackspace are trying to differentiate the bottom infrastructure-as-a-service layer of the cloud by touting security and “fanatical support,” respectively. Both are ways to charge a bit more and improve the bottom line. To understand the different layers of the cloud, check out our post Cloud Computing’s Three-Horse Race.

Computer Sciences Corp. (s csc), the IT service organization, today laid out its strategy for the cloud. Unsurprisingly, CSC’s cloud products will focus on being reliable and secure enough for enterprises and the federal government. CSC will continue providing its managed hosting business, but later this year will launch an infrastructure-as-a-service product that will provide secure cloud computing and storage that takes into account geographical location and differing regulatory environments. It will also build out a platform and offer software that will help companies connect other clouds to their secure CSC clouds or to the CSC platform. Pricing and further services built on top of CSC’s clouds and other clouds will be announced in the next few months.

Most interesting to me was that Brian Boruff, vice president of CSC’s Cloud Computing business, said the company was leaning toward building its cloud infrastructure with Cisco’s new unified computing system. Given the competition CSC has with the IT services offered by HP (s Hpq) and IBM (s ibm), it is also evaluating Dell (s dell) hardware. However, CSC did participate in the launch of Cisco’s new unified computing systems, and Boruff said, “We’re talking to Dell, but right now the most advanced discussions are with Cisco.”

CSC’s cloud computing offerings would compete with those from Rackspace (s RAX) and Amazon (s AMZN) at the infrastructure-as-a-service level. Because of the high levels of reliability and customer service emphasized by CSC, I imagine it will draw business from folks who are considering Rackspace’s CloudServer product. Those folks may need a better service level agreement or exact knowledge about where their data is being stored than what Amazon currently offers. The announcement also leaves me wondering when IBM and HP are going to announce their own big cloud computing plays, rather than webinars and research projects. I think this summer, we’re going to see some big players launch real products  to take on various layers of the cloud.

Google (s goog) and Salesforce.com (s crm) said today at the Google I/O Developer Conference that their platforms as a service will talk with one another. Using the libraries provided by Force.com for Google App Engine, developers can now access the data stored in the Salesforce.com cloud from inside Google’s App Engine. This is a powerful vote of confidence for Google’s App Engine, because it allows developers building applications on Google’s platform to access the Force.com platform that enterprise customers are comfortable using.

Google is trying to use App Engine as a way to draw corporate users to its other online products such as Google Docs or Enterprise search. In addition to being a platform where any developer can build scalable applications, App Engine is one way for corporate IT departments to easily customize the other Google products — something large corporate users could be keen on doing. Now that App Engine can access information stored in Force.com (which can include a company’s Salesforce.com data), internal IT departments can add even more whiz-bang features to the programs they build on App Engine. It also marks the beginning of a world where multiple clouds talk to one another, and management of information between those clouds becomes more important.

App Engine competes against Microsoft’s (s msft) Azure and Rackspace’s (s rax) Mosso, rather than the basic infrastructure as a service offered by Amazon’s Web Services (s amzn).