On Monday, Google and Salesforce are officially announcing the complete integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps. TechCrunch broke the story last week. Now we have some more details. Google Apps will get exposure to Salesforce’s one million paying business subscribers, and Salesforce in turn will become more attractive to the “tens of millions” of business users on Google Apps.
Google is in effect becoming Salesforce’s productivity suite. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentation can be created from within Salesforce’s CRM application. GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle. Sales events and marketing campaigns can be overlayed onto a Google Calendar (see screen shot below), as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times.
The Google productivity apps are free unless a company wants to upgrade to the premier edition (which includes added security and management features) for $5/user/month. By summer, Salesforce will be reselling the premier edition itself for twice as much—$10/user/month—and will throw in telephone support and put everything on one bill.
Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff tells me that he is embracing Google as another way to undercut Microsoft:
You’ve seen what we have been doing is slowly integrating all of our services with theirs. Certainly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, which makes Google my best friend. I have spoken with a lot of customers who want to get off of Microsoft Word.
Of course, Microsoft’s desktop cp-Office apps are threatened long-term by Google Apps, and its own CRM software for small businesses is threatened by Salesforce. But why didn’t Salesforce simply build its own Web-based productivity apps as so many others are doing? Says Benioff:
I really didn’t want to compete against Google in an area they consider core.
Better to gang up against Microsoft together. Now he has the leading Web-based productivity suite baked into Salesforce. But that brings up another question. If Google and Salesforce are so well suited for each other, why doesn’t Google just buy Salesforce? It could accelerate the growth of Google’s enterprise business and make it a little bit less reliant on advertising dollars (since Salesforce charges monthly subscriptions). When I put this notion to Benioff, he punted it back to Google:
You should give them a call and ask them about that.
Something tells me I won’t get a straight answer from them either. But it is obvious that Google is thinking along the same lines when it comes to enterprise apps in the cloud. Just last week, Google launched its own marketplace for enterprise apps, which is similar to Salesforce’s AppExchange. Ultimately, though, how many different Web platform companies can co-exist? A Google-Salesforce combo could sew up the Web platform for enterprise apps.
What for buy Salesforce? Let Marc Benioff do all the work and Google suck the milkshake off Salesforce, how sweet
This is pretty powerful. Frankly, just having Gmail 100% integrated into SFDC alone may be the best piece — autotracking all customer email correspondence like this (which likely will work even better than existing solution in SFDC) would be reason enough to force a salesteam to switch from Outlook/exchange server to Gmail.
interest
Erick, the new demo video of Salesforce for Google Apps is now available online: http://www.yout...h?v=E-o0QmS5TzM
Smart partnership, smartest I’ve heard of in a long time.
Perhaps this explains why GrandCentral was “down” today… ?
I love it!! I’ve started to use Google Docs a lot more lately and I only see it getting better now that they’re integrating with SalesForce. Sweeet!!
Peter Epstein
http://www.TheWebWar.com
this is going to ROCK man! i can’t wait!
Salesforce is in the beginning of several nationwide seminar tours.
We plan to be at one and will definitely ask them – and get an answer of you
http://www.sale...rce.com/events/
http://www.sale...ts/tourdeforce/
This definitely must have the folks at Microsoft plotting their next move.
With the combination of these two platforms – there is little reason for MS Office products. For small business they have put together a the primary tools most need to operate.
The only thing I wish Salesforce would do is drop their prices for startup companies or businesses operating under 5 people. Atleast GoogleApps offers the free version or low priced model, but SaleForce has a fixed price for everyone of $50 + per user /per month. That is where a Google acquisition might be nice, since Google could offer multiple pricing levels.
what’s the future of web app?
…..”GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce. With one click, sales people who use Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle….”
That’s a cool feature.
On the other hand I agree with #1. Salesforce will be doing all the work. This will end up being a *nice* relationship. BUT, GOOG will end up acquiring Zoho.
After all these announcements GOOG is still missing a solid voice applicat
ion. Grandcentral was a $50M mistake.
For bloggers looking to cover the event, we have a resource page (links, video assets etc) set up at http://blogs.sa...-resources.html .
hohum… nothing interesting here. move along…
now you may think this is cool and all… imagine all your important data getting scanned and saved by google.
that is really nice, no? all the important data of your company in the hands of google… hehehe. goodluck.
I think this is good news for those who currently use Salesforce. Whether that will be effective against Microsoft remains to be seen.
These offerings start to bridge the gap between the tools that businesses need to run and the tools that people use to work. What’s remarkable is the role that partners played in today’s announcement, building on these platforms– Appirio launched an expanded services practice and 4 new (mostly free) extensions to Salesforce for Google Apps, allowing users to easily synchronize calendars, collaborate on marketing campaigns, find and embed documents, and create and share customized CRM dashboards (http://appirio....ducts/index.php). And this is just the beginning– solutions for business, meet solutions for businesspeople.
Google is a machine.
Mmmm…Why Google is not buying Salesforce and prefer to have that kind of deal ?
So This is what I think
http://ensarm.b...ng-history.html
@sira
Imagine, all of my important data in the hands of some of the best programmers in the world, at a company with a pretty good privacy record. Imagine that!
“Imagine, all of my important data in the hands of some of the best programmers in the world, at a company with a pretty good privacy record. Imagine that!”
You gotta be kidding me! Google have a pretty good privacy record? The same company that caved into China demand.
I doubt Fortune 500 or even mid level companies would want any companies to have their private data.
@Jack
What does Google’s China activities have to do with privacy? I thought that had more to do with state censorship.
I agree that fortune 500 companies are not going to go moving their data to Google Apps. But that was not my point.
Yeah this deal simply makes too much sense not to do. For similar reasons I would not be surprised if Google is not looking at Intuit. Intuit’s QuickBooks Online Edition (OE) could use a similar kind of integration with Google Apps. They both sell into mostly (for now) the SMB space. With a couple of quick moves Google’s software DNA for businesses could hit the inflection point probably much sooner than everyone predicted.
As an IT person in an enterprise environment I have a question: How are other companies with strict IT security policies, but also users of Salesforce.com, considering switching to Google Apps for email and such? Is all of this ready for prime-time? I would love to switch to Google Apps so I don’t have to support Exchange anymore, but what about the security risks/concerns? I think our main reason for not switching to Google Apps are the security concerns with having such an important part of our infrastructure out of our control. Any thoughts? Give me some justification to take to the decision makers!
If Microsoft’s Beta version, which I consider equivalent to Google Apps, is anything to go by, then their workspace.office.live.com is the best ever.
It allows to upload (goodbye flash disk!!) files ranging from Word processing to spreadsheets and etc.
Google comes out as nice when seen from a bloggers and email users’ point of view, though the ‘Docs’ experience is abit of an irritation than a relief.
Microsoft have an option now: scrap ads of/about Exchange Server and promote more of Outlook and Outlook Express
Thanks,
MM
Great article. It will be interesting to see what this does to Google Enterprise offerings.
Competition is always good, and salesforce/Google will garner it’s fair share of attention.
I’m excited to see what Redmond will do in responce.
I’d like to see more interoperability/ integration with Gears and/or openoffice.org.
We been running both Google Apps and Salesforce independently so the tight integration is a sweet deal for existing Salesforce users.
I think the challenges have to do with using the tool whenever you are offline, like on the plane. That has always been the challenge for stuff that follows that model, IMHO.
I see this as further evidence that SF is becoming more predatorial to the very appexchange partners it looks to recruit and develop. I find it very difficult from a business and technology standpoint to build a business on the SF model.
Kyle, I’m in a similar situation. You might find a few answers here (http://www.goog...plications.html) or here (http://www.goog...plications.html), but I suspect the biggest issue will be, “Who has access to our data under what circumstances?”
This is definitely good news for the both of them. We must say that with all the other mergings going on with various companies and/or websites – this one is one of the few smart moves!
This will work great until a company gets their first bill for overages on thier storage, big reason why a lot of companies are dumping SF.
Google wants to be the web’s platform of choice. Gmail and Googld Docs are just apps. Google could run Zoho just as easily (and without integrating it into Docs – different products for different markets), making the Google Cloud (aka, App Engine) the back end of everthing – just like Windows is today.
If Google can get enough of the premier online app providers (such as Saleforce.com, but others as well) to port to Google App Engine, then they become the standard. They’ll be built into the infrastructure of the web, and even if they start to lose Search market share to some startup no startup will be able to replace their world-wide super-computer.
Google knows that Search customers are easily lost. App customers will be a lot stickier. I expect that within two years AppExchange will be closed and both Saleforce.com will switch over to AppEngine. Salesforce.com will stand to save big $$$ by letting Google do what they do so well.
I would be interested to hear from SalesForce.com users if this is a value-add. Within larger companies where I’ve seen CRM implementations, integration with any office-type documents wasn’t critical to the normal workflow. It may be different with SalesForce.com, though.
If there is logical coordination there, this could be a pretty big deal. If there isn’t a connection beyond the “enemy/friend” relationship, I can’t imagine this being anything more than another sales-via-exposure channel for Google to find it’s way into the enterprise.
Either way, Google wins in this deal. If it’s the former, both Google and SalesForce win. If it’s the latter, I’m not sure how SalesForce benefits.
I expect they didn’t buy Salesforce because that would mean committing to SF as their “official” enterprise solution. Instead, they want to remain open to other partners who might be SF competitors (e.g., 37signals), and not drive those potential partners into the arms of MS/Yahoo or Zoho.
Hi Nick– I appreciate your comment on Salesforce storage, but the “cloud” has a answer for that problem: first of course, is Google Docs, which don’t hit your storage limits. And for the rest of your files, check out solutions like Appirio Cloud Storage (powered by Amazon S3), which is an order of magnitude less expensive. Check it out…
Hmm, Tightly integrated is it?
In order for an incoming email to become associated to its contact or lead it must be forwarded from gmail to one’s Salesforce account. Sure it is a simple process, but if it requires a second thought there may be integration, but it is not “tight”.
So far SugarCRM seems to be the only one on the right track with an truly integrated email module. RelentaCRM, while still pretty immature (and very expensive), also has the right concept by wrapping a web app CRM around email.
I’ve got an idea. How about a Salesforce Lite CRM tight integrated into gmail.