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Salesforce partners with Google Apps to grow SaaS offerings


By Robert Mullins
April 14, 2008 — 
Salesforce.com has made a deal with Google, to be announced today, for its customers to gain access to Google Apps. It is a move one analyst said enhances the viability of the software-as-a-service model.

Salesforce for Google Apps, as it’s called, will offer Google’s multiple office productivity applications integrated with Salesforce’s customer relationship management and other applications, Salesforce said in a news release. Business customers can access these combined applications via the Internet without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain.

The partnership is an extension of previous collaborations between the two companies, said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a prepared statement. “Together, we are making more applications and services available online so customers can focus on building their core business rather than the applications that support it."

The deal makes SaaS a more attractive alternative to the traditional license model for software, said Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of the research firm THINKstrategies. Moreover, buyers of SaaS, who are seeing a “gold rush” of various SaaS vendors emerging, may be more confident buying from major players like Salesforce and Google.

“Some IT customers are becoming a bit apprehensive about having to buy their SaaS apps from too many sources,” said Kaplan, “so the winners are going to be the more prominent players who have the strongest platform or the broadest portfolio of service.”

Among the integrated applications in the Salesforce-Google offering are the following: Salesforce and Gmail for keeping track of e-mails; Salesforce and Google Docs for real-time collaboration by multiple users on the same document; Salesforce and Google Talk for instant messaging; and Salesforce and Google Calendar, for scheduling meetings and events, and viewing the calendars of others being brought in on a project.

The partnership was spurred in part by customer comments on Salesforce’s Ideas Exchange, its community forum, said Clarence So, chief marketing officer of Salesforce. “They said, ‘We love working together with these products, [so] let’s just put it all in one place.’ ”

Salesforce for Google Apps will be available to Salesforce customers at no charge today, while a paid support service plan for the program, at US$10 per user per month, is expected to be available sometime this summer.

News of the partnership has further fueled speculation that the next step could be Google’s outright acquisition of Salesforce, which has also been the subject of speculation involving Oracle or Microsoft as the buyer.

THINKstrategies’ Kaplan has no inside knowledge of any imminent deal, but said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.”

He has written of the possibility of Oracle making a bid for Salesforce to shore up Oracle’s burgeoning SaaS business, but added, “If that were to come about, it would be Google that would be the white knight that would come in to try to rescue Salesforce.”


Related Search Term(s): Google, Saas, Salesforce


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