In a blog post yesterday, Quinton Wall, Director of Technical Platform Marketing and general developer evangelist for Salesforce.com, makes the case that the App Store economy is here to stay – and that the enterprise cloud developers who are going to succeed are those who leverage the all-important idea of context to make apps more useful and more powerful.

I had the chance to talk to Wall briefly for a deeper dive into the importance of context. Between the Heroku and Force.com platform-as-a-service  offerings, Salesforce.com runs 2.4 million apps from 500,000 developers, Wall claims, giving the company a lot of insight into market trends.

And the way the cloud app market is going, Wall says, is towards a true API economy. Cross-app, cross-cloud integration between apps is the new gold standard, as enterprises no longer need costly, complex middleware deployments in order to have data from one place enter into another. After all, Apple is baking Facebook and Twitter integration deeply into the forthcoming iOS 6 so photos can go straight from device to social media, and thanks to the consumerization trend in IT, enterprise users expect exactly the same from the tools they use to do business every day.

In a practical sense, that means the ability to, say, sync a note from Evernote to Salesforce.com CRM and have that update be pushed out across the Salesforce Chatter social network. It’s all about making everyday tools into a mesh of interconnected data streams, keeping everything available to every app, all the time. This post-website, all APIs everywhere idea has led startups like Mashery to considerable commercial success, to underscore Wall’s point. But a step beyond that is that all-important idea of context. Which is to say, once all your data is in that mesh, available via API, JSON and identity services to every other app across clouds and devices, it’s about getting the right data at the right time.

Take a look at Google Now, the borderline creepy/cool feature that Google is including in Android Jelly Bean, the next version of its mobile OS. Google Now hinges on answering questions you haven’t asked yet – about commute times, about the weather, about sports, even about flights. That’s an extreme example, but geolocation, device, identity, and so on are all going to be critical building blocks of the next generation of enterprise applications. Even the big guns of the market like EMC are trying to help large enterprises convert their data warehouses to help meet the oncoming storm of on-demand insights based on the tsunami of data generated, as per a recent EMC Consulting webcast.

In short, Wall says, enterprise cloud developers and customers can’t afford to wait on the new app-centric model. It’s all in accordance with the Salesforce.com party line: The world is going social, mobile and collaborative, and it’s absolutely vital that enterprises make sure that they’re supplying all the necessary context to users.