Google and Salesforce can’t seem to get enough of each other: over a series of announcements the companies have aligned their product strategies more and more closely over time. Now the companies are planning something new together, to be announced by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Google VP Engineering Vic Gundotra at Salesforce’s upcoming Tour de Force developer event on June 23 in Santa Clara.

A year ago Salesforce integrated adwords tracking into their platform. Then two months ago we heard rumors that the companies were planning on deeper product integration - it turned out to be the complete integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps.

With the most recent announcement Google in effect became 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, as well as colleague’s schedules for figuring out convenient meeting times.

So what will the two companies announce later this month? Gundotra, who keynoted the recent Google I/O conference, is responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs at Google. That includes things like Android, Gears and Open Social. Connecting the dots isn’t too hard.

Stateless Systems has launched a professional, subscription based version of its hosted content management system CushyCMS.

I interviewed Guy King from Stateless for the CushyCMS launch in April (the post includes a demo video) and he mentioned then that the long-term plan for CushyCMS was to offer a professional subscription version. King tells me that the demand for a professional version of CushyCMS was strong from the day the service launched, so they immediately started building it. As of last week, the free version of CushyCMS has more than 4,600 active users, a tidy number given this isn’t an every day consumer based product.

CushyCMS is a simple content management system that aims to make life easier for web designers by simplifying content management. Web designers use CushyCMS to give content editors (for example a client) access to part, full or many pages at a granular level (headings, images, sidebars, etc), enabling them to update or create standards-compliant content directly from a browser without messing with the sites coding.

CushyCMS Pro is being offered at $28/month and features branding support, including a custom logo, colors and domain (e.g. acmedesign.clienteditor.com). There is no set-up fee or minimum subscription length and both PayPal and AlertPay are accepted.

In addition, several new features have been added to the free version of CushyCMS, including SFTP support (secure FTP), Improved WYSIWYG editor and Support for IIS and other Microsoft-based FTP servers.

Former TechCrunch writer Duncan Riley edits The Inquisitr, a daily dose of tech, pop and penguins.

Salesforce’s stock price jumped over 10% today to an all time high (the Nasdaq rose a little over 1%). The company’s market cap rose $743 million, to $8.06 billion. Why the big jump? There is no public information or news emerging to support the increase.

Our sources in private equity say it was fueled by whispers of Google acquisition talks. And short sellers (Salesforce has a lot of them) may have moved to cover their positions, magnifying the rumor effect. 2.92 million shares traded today, about 55% more than average.

A week ago Google and Salesforce announced broad integration of Google Apps (Docs, Calendar, Gmail, and Gtalk) and Salesforce’s online enterprise apps, which, our sources say, may just be a test of a more serious relationship.

If Google were to acquire Salesforce (and to be clear, we’re hearing nothing other than the private equity based rumors) it would likely be a cash deal to avoid earnings dilution. Salesforce is trading at an impressive 319 times forward earnings, compared to Google’s 32.66. Cisco and Oracle are said to be interested as well, but not Microsoft.

Here’s the interesting thing about the rumor - everything we hear from Silicon Valley sources says it isn’t happening. We’ve heard Google’s corporate development team is actually knee deep in another, much smaller transaction. And why put so much time into ironing out the elaborate business development deal announced last week if it’s only a prelude to an acquisition?

Salesforce’s Q1 financials will be announced on May 6.

UserVoice offers a hosted way to harness the innovation and ideas of customers and potential customers that replaces email.

San Francisco based UserVoice improves the signal-to-noise of user opinion by allowing the moderation of the ideas of one person against the opinions of the many. UserVoice allows users to voice opinions, suggestions, and complaints. The video above demonstrates how it works (it’s difficult to pigeon hole) but think focus groups for companies that can’t afford focus groups, with elements of a forum and even Digg style voting thrown in for good measure.

For companies, UserVoice offers an open and transparent process for customer feedback to any company. The system also allows site owners to ask the community more directed questions (e.g. by a poll) about how users like a new feature or what they think of a specific idea.

I first saw UserVoice when I interviewed Guy King for CushyCMS (post here), King loves the service and although I didn’t video it, he spent 5 minutes showing me how they were using it. It’s always a good sign when people not involved with the company spontaneously evangelize a product. CushyCMS’s UserVoice page here and the official demo page for UserVoice can be viewed here.

The service is completely free during the public beta. UserVoice competes with SalesForce (IdeaExchange) and GetSatisfaction.

Intuit wants in on the race to become the platform for enterprise apps in the cloud. It is opening up QuickBase to developers who want to build new hosted Web applications and businesses on top of it. QuickBase has been around for eight years and has amassed 250,000 users. At its core is an online database around which companies can create their own customized enterprise apps for things like project management or issue tracking. Now developers can join the QuickBase beta to develop their own enterprise apps on Intuit’s infrastructure. Intuit will host the apps, take care of the billing, and allow developers to charge whatever they want.

Intuit is joining a crowded field. Salesforce.com has its AppExchange and Force.com. Amazon has its Web services, including SimpleDB. Google just launched its App Engine. And startups like Coghead are also angling for position.

But Intuit already has a lot of small business customers that, in turn, can help it attract developers to its new platform. Bill Lucchini, the general manager of Quickbase tells me:

It is great to have a cool piece of technology, but we have to make sure that developers build successful businesses. Giving them the tools to get in front of our customers is strategy No. 1

He realizes that decent technology is just table stakes. Developers will get access to QuickBase via APIs to use as a foundation for their apps, and they also get hooks into QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting software that is used by nearly 25 million individuals in 3.6 million businesses in the U.S. alone. Developers will be able to build apps using Adobe Flex and the open-source Eclipse development environment. For the technically-minded, here is a screencast that goes into more details.

Although the economics have yet to be fully worked out, Intuit plans to charge using a utility model similar to Amazon’s that goes up the mnore resources a developer’s app consumes. Says Lucchini:

We are trying to price these things where developers can charge $10 to $20 per user per month and make a profit. Small businesses are pretty price sensitive.

The Web platform wars are in full swing. Which platform will developers flock to for enterprise apps?

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.

Google is obviously making big moves into the enterprise. In February, it relaunched JotSpot as Google Sites under the enterprise group, and next week it is expected to announce deeper integration of Google Apps with Salesforce.com, which should help it introduce Google Apps to more business customers. But today, it is taking a page from Salesforce.com by launching its own marketplace for third-party applications and consulting services that enhance Google’s enterprise offerings (mainly Google Apps and enterprise search). Salesforce, of course, has its AppExchange where smaller companies can sell on-demand software to Salesforce customers (and have Salesforce host the apps).

Google is calling its exchange the Google Solutions Marketplace. It replaces a simpler Enterprise Solutions Gallery that Google had before. While Google won’t be hosting the apps (it is just a free listings service), companies can create their own product profiles. Customers can search for Google-related enterprise apps all in one place and rate them. Google needs to create momentum around its enterprise products so that smaller companies will want to develop add-ons and create businesses around them. Right now the offerings seem pretty thin. There are a bunch of syncing tools, identity management offerings, add-on gadgets, and integration with other enterprise apps. But what is lacking is an economic model that would really motivate developers to build on top of Google’s Enterprise apps. The free exposure, though, is a start.

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.

Bungee Labs has raised $8 million Series C in a round that included Wasatch Venture Fund and existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners and Venrock Associates.

Orem, Utah based Bungee Labs offers Bungee Connect, a web-based Ajax environment for creating interactive web applications. Bungee Connect allows developers to “efficiently create and instantly deliver rich web applications for the small-to-medium business market” by providing an online environment where developers and clients don’t have to install anything. Bungee Connect also automates SOAP and REST based web services. See our February 2008 review of Bungee Connect here.

Bungee Connect competes with DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks.

Total funding to date was not available, with the previous rounds having been raised in August 2005 and November 2006.

(via PEHub)

If you’ve heard of Zoho, you probably think of Zoho Office, its suite of Web-based productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation). But Zoho Office is primarily as a marketing exercise. Zoho’s real business is in offering a series of Web-based enterprise apps that it started introducing last September—CRM, Project Management, Web conferencing, an online database. And today it is adding Zoho People in beta.

Zoho People is a Web-based enterprise app for managing human resources—recruiting, org charts, HR forms, an employee self-service portal. Here are some screenshots and an online demo.

Zoho People is targeted at small businesses with 50 or more employees—companies that cannot afford PeopleSoft, but cannot manage their business on Excel spreadsheets anymore. More directly, Zoho is going after WorkDay (started by PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield), Salesforce.com, and smaller online HR apps such as Vemo’s. To get businesses to try it, the software will be free for the beta period. The pricing is yet to be determined, but will probably be in the range of $50/month for HR administrators and $4/month for other employees. It will also be available as part of Zoho’s suite of enterprise apps under blended pricing. Maybe Salesforce should just buy Zoho. Oh yeah, it already tried that.

Zoho People from Raju Vegesna on Vimeo.

Nick Carr has a lead on the story that we all knew was coming eventually: Key Microsoft applications, including Office, may be moving online, soon. Carr’s source says to look for enterprise applications to move online as web services with Salesforce-like usage fees, popular PC applications to move online with advertising support, and expansion of its data center network to provide storage for everything.

In short, they’re responding to Google Apps and Google Docs, which now account, according to analysts, for up to 2-3% of Google’s total revenue (call it $400m a year, up from $40m a year ago) (note: I can’t find a source for this, but it was quoted to me by a senior Google employee last week). That’s still pennies compared to Microsoft’s $16b or so in annual Office revenue, but the trend is pretty clear - users like free, and they like the ability to collaborate on documents. Today, Google offers what is in many ways a superior product to Office and they don’t charge users for it.

That’s created a textbook Innovator’s Dilemma for Microsoft. And the people up in Redmond are probably smart enough not to simply roll over and die.

The obvious time to do it is at the Mix conference later this week. Where, we hear, Microsoft may also be announcing an offline version of Silverlight to compete with Adobe Air. Would Microsoft release online versions of office via the Silverlight platform? Perhaps… Adobe has their own version, called Buzzword.

In the middle of this sits Salesforce, the king of software on demand. At some point Google or Microsoft will make a serious move to acquire them, and at that point the other will respond with a counter. That at least partially explains why Salesforce continues to be valued by the market at an absurd P/E ratio of over 600 (their continued revenue growth is another reason).

Rollbase will tomorrow officially launch its do-it-yourself, on-demand application development and delivery platform offering Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for users who aren’t programming experts.

Rollbase can be used to design, develop and deploy custom Web-based applications using intuitive and interactive tools within a web browser. It’s pitched as providing “an easy to learn and flexible toolset in a rich AJAX-based user experience” making “web-based application development possible for people who may not have the time, resources or expertise to create on-demand applications using traditional software development methods.”

In laymen’s terms: it allows the rest of us to design and customize business applications.

Rollbase components include

• wizards for creating database tables, fields, relationships and other application components
• interactive drag and drop page editor with ability to embed any HTML, scripts or widgets
• portal technology for building sophisticated external-facing applications that can be embedded in other Web sites and Web-based applications
• workflow engine with automation, trigger conditions and event queue management
• search engine with global full text search and field-specific indexing control
• Conversion maps for seamless integration between and among all Rollbase applications
• Custom ad-hoc reporting, 2D and 3D animated real-time charting

Rollbase operates in the same space as Force.com, but Rollbase notes that it’s designed for business users that don’t have access to programmers or developers.

TechCrunch readers can click here to sign up for a free 60 day trial account on Rollbase.

Yeah, we’ve seen a ton of online application builders before - DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. And Salesforce weighed in with their own Force.com in late 2007.

Bungee Connect , which leaves private beta today, competes with all of these. But the company, based in Utah, thinks they have the advanced features to attract a much different audience than most of those startups. They’re targeting hard core developers, not non-developers who want a way to create simple software programs to solve problems at the office.

Bungee Connect is a single online environment for developers to write, test, deploy and host applications. Like Force.com, it is a platform-as-a-service. The service is free until end users actually start using the products built and deployed on the service.

Dana Gardner wrote an excellent overview of the service a year ago when Bungee Connect was first introduced.

Tis the season for deal speculation, with Tom Foremski quoting sources who say that Salesforce has approached Oracle “to gauge if there is any interest in a sale at $75 a share.”

If Oracle did take the deal, it would value Salesforce at just shy of $9 billion.

Michael wrote in June 2007 that Saleforce was “acquisition bait,” although at the time the rumors were pointing to a deal with Google. That didn’t happen, although Google and Salesforce did end up partnering for online ad sales.

Salesforce’s stock has weathered the stock market downturn fairly well, closing at $50.86 Friday, down from a peak of $64 in December, however a deal at $75 a share is still down on speculation of a deal at $80-$85 a share last year.

See our previous Salesforce coverage here.

CRM and SaaS provider Salesforce.com have announced that there Force.com Cloud Computing Architecture (our review here) is to now offer Development-as-a-Service (DaaS), a new pricing structure and a developer competition.

The DaaS service consists of a new set of development tools and APIs that allow enterprise developers to harness cloud computing. The tools offer full access to the database, logic and user interface capabilities of the Force.com Platform, unifying development and IT collaboration tools with Force.com Platform-as-a-Service. The new service includes a Metadata API, Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Sandbox, and Code Share that all developers to build enterprise Software-as-a-Service applications.

The new pricing model includes a pay-per-login utility pricing model for the Force.com Platform and Development-as-a-Service. The model offers a cheaper alternative to companies that may use applications in the cloud less often, in theory making the service more affordable to use. Force.com cloud (per login) has a list price is $5.00 per login with a maximum of 5 logins per user per month, and will be offered at $0.99 per login to the end 2008. For more frequent users (more then 5 logins per month) must sign up to Force.com’s unlimited pricing plan of $50 per user per month.

Salesforce.com and Emergence Capital Partners have also announced a new competition, the Force.com $1 Million Challenge – a venture competition for entrepreneurs and companies building on the Force.com platform. Winners will receive a $1 million investment from Emergence Capital as well as space in Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Incubator facility for one year. The winner will be announced in November at Dreamforce 2008.