Google And Salesforce Cooking Up Something New Together

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.