Salesforce and Google say they will share data between Google Analytics 360 and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Ron Miller / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This data-sharing deal is the concrete payoff of the strategic partnership Google and Salesforce announced in late 2017, which until now was mostly about wiring G Suite into Salesforce's CRM. It also lands weeks after Salesforce bought MuleSoft and launched its Integration Cloud, making interoperability an explicit product line rather than a side effect.
For Google, the move gives its Analytics 360 Suite, built in 2016 to challenge Adobe's Marketing Cloud directly, a distribution channel it lacked: Salesforce's marketer base. For Salesforce, it extends a pattern already visible in its broadened Microsoft partnership of treating rival platforms as integration partners instead of walls.
First-order effects
- Enterprise marketers using both stacks can pipe Google Analytics 360 audience and behavior data into Salesforce Marketing Cloud campaigns without custom middleware, making the combined offering usable on day one.
- Adobe's Marketing Cloud loses the default position it held when Analytics 360 had no equivalent CRM-side partner, forcing its sales teams to compete on integration depth rather than bundle convenience.
Second-order effects
- Rival marketing-cloud vendors face pressure to strike comparable data-sharing pacts with whichever CRM or analytics leader they don't own, since Salesforce has now shown the playbook with Google after doing versions of it with Microsoft and later AWS.
- Salesforce's own Integration Cloud and MuleSoft business gains a flagship reference case: every new partner integration like this one is also a sales argument for buying its middleware.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise SaaS competition shifts from closed-suite lock-in toward federated data alliances, where the durable advantage is being the hub other platforms agree to integrate with — a structure Salesforce has been assembling across Google, Microsoft, and AWS.
- Analytics vendors that lack a major CRM alliance risk being squeezed into commodity tooling, as the pairing of web-analytics data with campaign execution becomes table stakes for enterprise marketing budgets.
The trend: Enterprise cloud vendors are competing through cross-platform data-sharing alliances rather than walled suites, with Salesforce positioning itself as the integration hub between formerly rival stacks.