Salesforce.com, Google release first joint product
(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc. announced a strategic global partnership Tuesday, but it wasn't the widely expected tight integration between Google Apps and Salesforce.com's hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software.
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement caps a run of buildup: Salesforce.com had already shipped a Google marketing tool back in August 2006, and reports in late May 2007 had the two companies discussing an alliance that the Wall Street Journal framed as a potential counterweight to Microsoft. What arrived instead of the expected suite-level deal is a narrower opening move: a strategic global partnership whose first jointly built product ties Google's AdWords advertising data into Salesforce.com's hosted CRM, per the same-day TechCrunch coverage of the AdWords integration.
The notable negative is what did not ship. Both companies confirmed the deal excludes the widely anticipated tight coupling between Google Apps and Salesforce.com's CRM — so this is a marketing-data alliance first, with the productivity-suite question left open rather than answered.
First-order effects
- Marketers running both platforms get AdWords performance data flowing directly into Salesforce.com's CRM, closing the loop between ad spend and sales outcomes inside a single hosted system.
- Microsoft becomes the named competitive target of the pairing: the alliance gives both companies a joint answer to Microsoft's push into hosted software, without either ceding its core product territory.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in hosted CRM and online office suites face pressure to line up equivalent partnerships, since the combined ad-plus-CRM pitch is hard for a single vendor to replicate alone.
- Google gains a beachhead into business-software accounts through the CRM relationship while deferring any head-on collision between Google Apps and incumbent office suites — the partnership tests demand before committing to deeper integration.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, business applications consolidate around stitched-together best-of-breed web services rather than single-vendor suites, with advertising platforms and CRM systems forming the revenue-linked core of that stack.
- The withheld Google Apps integration shows partnership scope being used as a sequencing tool: vendors announce the lowest-friction integration first, keeping the higher-stakes product-category moves as unexercised options — a structure likely to recur across SaaS alliances.
The trend: Enterprise software competition in 2007 is shifting from standalone suites toward cross-vendor SaaS alliances that bind advertising platforms to business applications, with Microsoft as the shared antagonist.