Salesforce.com, which styles itself the enterprise cloud computing company, has expanded its global strategic alliance with Google Monday, connecting its Force.com development platform with Google’s App Engine.

Industry observers expect big things to happen over time as cloud platforms merge in this manner. In the recent past, Salesforce had announced similar arrangements with Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

The latest hook up will leverage the already strong connections users make between the two platforms. It will open up new vistas for application developers - with the availability of Force.com platform as a service (PaaS) for the Google App Engine application development platform, users will be able to develop applications in the cloud.

Adam Gross, Salesforce.com’s vice president of developer marketing, told InternetNews.com: “Five out of the top 10 most popular applications on AppExchange take advantage of both Google and Salesforce.”

While Google’s App Engine is aimed at developers who want to quickly and easily build scalable Web applications, Force.com provides a database, Java-like programming language, integration and workflow capabilities, and user-interface design tools for creating business applications that run on Salesforce’s cloud infrastructure.

No wonder Gross said that with the tie-up, it is entirely up to the imagination of developers what they create!

Google’s director of product management, Tom Stocky added: “Bringing together Google App Engine and Force.com will foster the creation of new Web applications and further demonstrate the power of the Web as a platform.”