As mentioned previously, Google is spending a lot of time “in the clouds” so to sepak. They’ve been emphasizing cloud computing a lot lately, even going so far as to make a 99.9% guarantee with regarding to up-time for Google Apps. Google also has been upgrading Google Apps APIs, and today have announced the expansion of capabilities for the Google Visualization API.
This API was introduced earlier this year as the product of Google’s acquisition of Gapminder. The Google Visualization API was designed to make it quick and easy for people to use advanced visualization technology like that of Gapminder. The API allows users to build apps on top of Google Spreadsheets as a post on the Official Google Blog mentions. The post says that the API now enables developers to:
…display data from any data source connected to the web (any database, Excel spreadsheet, etc.), not just from Google Spreadsheets. From pivot tables and heat graphs to motion charts and timelines, the Google Visualization Gallery holds a growing set of 40+ visualizations that appeal to a multitude of businesses.
CRM giant Salesforce has released some tools that compliment the API. That company had a big day today at the Dreamforce conference. “They are announcing a way to build apps that connect the internal facing processes that drive and account for transactions with the external public web based apps,” writes Bernard Lunn at Read Write Web. “This is a big move. The two examples they showed were travel and recruitment, but it does not take too much imagination to think of more.”
Google points to their Force.com Apex Code classes for Google Visualizations.
“The enhancement of the Google Visualization API represents a significant opportunity for developers,” said Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com. “We expect to see the creation of new tools for our users to quickly generate reports and dashboards for their Salesforce CRM data and in their Force.com applications. These enhanced analysis capabilities will provide our customers with greater productivity and deeper insight into their businesses.”
The cloud is likely going to be a place where more and more companies find themselves residing moving into the future. Google API expansions will probably continue to fuel this. I expect to see more these types of moves over the coming year.
