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April 7, 2008

“Deep Integration” Between Google Apps and Salesforce to Be Announced Next Monday

Erick Schonfeld

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Salesforce will be making a whole bunch of partner announcements at an event in San Francisco next Monday. We’ve been informed that the on-demand enterprise software company will begin reselling Google’s Web-based applications such as Google Docs to its customers. These Web apps will be available within Salesforce.com and tightly integrated into its service.

Such a deal makes a lot of sense. Salesforce customers can already manage their AdWords campaigns from within Salesforce.com, a deal that was announced last summer. Salesforce wants to get as close to Google as it can. And Google wants to sell its apps to enterprise customers (Salesforce has 41,000 of them).

While Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff might be happy to sell Salesforce to Oracle for $75 a share, he might be even happier to sell it to Google. Buying Salesforce would certainly turbocharge Google’s efforts to sell into enterprise accounts.

This integration news doesn’t come entirely out of the blue. Last March, Google Operating System noticed some signs of the coming integration within certain CSS files used by Google Apps. References to Google Apps were also found in Salesforce services.

Salesforce refused to comment on the announcement and we’re still waiting to hear back from Google.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Chris

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:32 pm

    What’s the over under on when Google will buy SalesForce?

    Any takers?

  2. John Lynn

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    I love it. Sell a service that is normally free. I guess they’re paying for the “tight integration”?

  3. Me

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:56 pm

    “This will save us billions… literally billions.”, they said after the meeting with the Google sales person. The gaint has awaken.

  4. Peter Urban

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:58 pm

    It makes sense but then it doesn’t…

    Salesforce is very much enterprise oriented with their tools - so much that most small businesses fail to use their suit successfully. Early adopters for Google apps on the other hand come mostly out of the small biz camp. My bet is that most Google apps users come from companies that can’t afford to run a big IT apparatus or that simply don’t want to do that anymore. Those are (at least at this moment in time) certainly not (yet) enterprise type organizations.

    For Salesforce it makes sense to complete their suite (albeit for some already to bloated) with office type applications. But still, I wonder how many of their typical clients will drop their existing enterprise office and work with Google apps withing SF. Since Salesforce was the first to successfully introduce the SAAS model to larger organizations they might as well be a good help to Google in making a dent into the traditional office automation market.

    For Google on the other hand it makes sense to reach out to the enterprise types since every new user is a gain for them, no matter where they come form. Why the Google apps are ’sold’ through SF while they are free from Google directly remains a mystery for me.

  5. YDRIVE

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:18 pm

    Perfecto scenario… :-o

  6. advertboy

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    why would SF sell itself.. they are doing perfectly fine on there own! And there business model is completely different to that of Googles!

    Not a good match at all!

  7. whoopie

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:25 pm

    FLUFF ANNOUNCEMENT. how do you resell google docs???

    yahoo used to do this all the time, claiming new users for yahoo mail when a “partner” would ofer to put a “sign up for yahoo mail!” link at the bottom of their page

    this is all google has left, vaporware and fluff “announcements”

  8. Jeffrey

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    If they’re just going to integrate Google Docs then why did Salesforce acquire Koral?

  9. Mystery CEO

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:58 pm

    Great news (I think) - am just wondering how I’ll integrate…

    I agree with Peter - we’re a small business and we do use Google Docs, we’re just getting into Salesforce soon…I guess it’ll be good for us.

  10. Isaac Garcia

    April 7th, 2008 at 5:05 pm

    Sounds like Google can’t get traction on their own (by themselves) so they are trying to get street cred with “the enterprise” by hooking up with SF.com.

    Benioff will take any excuse to ride the wave, increase the stock and relish in the PR. Good for him. He’s the best at it. Benioff must be loving this.

    Google? Looks a little desperate to me.

  11. ValleyDude

    April 7th, 2008 at 5:18 pm

    If I recall right, Salesforce made exactly the same “announcement” a while ago. Masters of PR …

  12. Kawika Holbrook

    April 7th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Speaking from the IT perspective of a small (25 employees) company, elegant and effective integration among email, office and CRM apps would be well worth the money. The devil’s in the details, but employees that can log into a single site to do much of their job (rather than switch between this SaaS provider, that email client, and this other office suite) would boost productivity and ease tech training and support headaches.

  13. Ed

    April 7th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    I’m thinking a lot of people here don’t use either salesforce or google apps. There are a lot of potential integration points here that would be awesome additions to the salesforce platform. It would be awesome if they somehow integrated the new recently released google wiki into the platform and the integration of Gmail into the platform should scare the living crap out of all the email integration partners. Google calendar and an integration of Google Reader for Account related RSS feeds and Alerts would be fantastic. I could go on and on about this and I’m not even touching potential the benefits of document, spreadsheet, presentation and storage integations.

    I also think this is a brilliant move by google who is throwing a major barrier into any potential acquisition of salesforce by microsoft who would be the most likely acquirer for salesforce in an attempt to bolster its web SAAS capabilities.

    Seems like a win-win situation for both companies and a lose for everyone else

  14. Tom Lee, Jr.

    April 7th, 2008 at 6:41 pm

    We have been using both Salesforce and Google docs for awhile - and waiting for closer integration.

    However, we want to see the integration of Gmail (without Outlook thank you) and Google calendar first. We rely on those outside the SF shell.

    Docs was/were secondary but gaining momentum as its collaboration features (ex. version change notification) broaden.

    Also, we were EE users but downgraded recently because so many SF features/apps are serious overkill for us small guyz and totally over the top on $$.

  15. Westadd

    April 7th, 2008 at 6:58 pm

    jeffery,
    what do koral and google docs integration have to do with each other? Nothing. There are many more unstructured data formats than MS.

  16. Zach Katkin

    April 7th, 2008 at 7:25 pm

    I think this would be a tremendous move on Google’s end. It is an instant in to enterprises - both small to large. In regards to a comment regarding Salesforce only for larger organizations, although that is true I’m sure Google would be able to rebrand as a multi-tiered tool for every business.

  17. web hosting

    April 8th, 2008 at 2:11 am

    Depends on how well these apps integrate with the system.

  18. Mark Silva

    April 8th, 2008 at 5:51 am

    I like what this means beyond the press release potential. Moves like these signify massive dislocation potential. Salesforce + Google could represent profound shift in small business and B2B potential.

    If it works, it means that in 2-3 years you could be managing businesses of any size on post-PC devices such as smarter–Phone-like devices or <$100 terminals (see OneLapTopPerChild for example).

    Consider Salesforce (CRM)+ Plaxo (2.0 contact mgmt with socialnet connectivity)+Google Ad Words (search campaign mgmt)+DoubleClick (general campaign mgmt)+GoogleAnalytics (webside analytics)+Google Gears (ability to be offline)+Google Docs and GMAIl=end-to-end contact and campaign managment.

    In other words, the ability to effect sales and communications while measuring the effect of each touch at any time and any place. That’s Enterprise-strength infrastructure that scales from one person to one million.

  19. Paul

    April 8th, 2008 at 7:57 am

    Google already is selling a premier edition of Google Apps that costs $50/user/year. The premier edition gets 25 GB of storage per email address plus a 99.9% uptime guarantee. It also gets email compliance from Postini, access to google support, and other stuff that would seem important for an enterprise size company.
    http://www.google.com/a/help/i.....tions.html

    I would bet that only the premier edition will be integrated with Salesforce. As a small company and a consultant that has worked with larger companies, this will be a huge advantage for the companies that can actually roll it out. Yes, it may be hard for some enterprise companies to make the switch, but it will save millions in IT spend if they can.

    And as for salesforce, many of their customers have been waiting for email integration for a long time, so this will be another huge capability for them. Add on the other google apps, and we now have the cloud office of the future.

  20. Brennan

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:28 am

    Integration with Google Calendar seems like a more useful feature for the majority of Google/SF users than integration with Google Docs.

    Just ask any sales guy whose Salesforce Calendar doesn’t synch up with his Google Calendar. It’s the biggest headache and it seems like one of those simple features that should have been here yesterday.

  21. Adam

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:58 am

    Anyone who uses the Salesforce for Google Adwords integration or has experience with both product families will see the benefits of integration.

    If/when Gmail is 100% integrated into Salesforce for example, companies using SF would cease to have a need to run MS Outlook.

    In regards to the rumored sale of Salesforce, we’ve heard this before numerous times..

    http://www.salesforcetimes.com.....-unlikely/
    http://www.salesforcetimes.com.....sforcecom/

  22. Infowelder

    April 8th, 2008 at 9:57 am

    I’m enthused but the google doc integration but now that it will be easier to manage docs the 1g space limitations provided by Salesforce will be an even bigger issue.

    Let me guess, pay for “Google storage” similar to appirio’s usage of Amazon’s storage service…? Seems like salesforce should step up and provide reasonable amount of storage for reasonable amount of money.

    All this stuff is so new. The fact that the publication covering this news is entitled “Earth Times” has me sitting firmly on the sideline waiting for things to flesh out.
    http://www.earthtimes.org/arti.....1536.shtml

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