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Rumor: Google And Salesforce.com In Partnership Talks

from the the-long-feared-Google-CRM dept

Mon, May 21st 2007 8:24am — Joseph Weisenthal

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on rumors that Salesforce.com and Google are close to forming some sort of partnership. The rumor has actually been floating around for a little while, so it sounds like there may be some legitimacy to it. If the two companies did decide to hook up, it wouldn't be hard to see the rationale. Google has long ago dropped the pretense that it's not competing with traditional software vendors, as it's even changed its corporate tagline to "Search, Ads & Apps". As for Salesforce.com, it's facing mounting competition from vendors like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft in its core business, so an alliance with Google might be a way for it to beat back the competition. Still, it's not clear what an alliance would actually accomplish. As the Journal reports it, the companies may offer a link between Google's email and document authoring apps and Salesforce.com's CRM service. That's fine, but it raises the question: why can't customers do this already if they want? Despite all the talk about how web services are made to be mashed up and so forth, people are realizing that it's often easier said than done, and that a lot of web services are isolated silos. Customers are then at the whim of the vendor, which decides what other services they'll offer integration with. So while Salesforce.com looks to gain an edge by doing a deal with Google, it leaves room for a competitor to succeed by being more open.

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11 Comments

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Matt Bennett, 21 May 2007 @ 9:03am

Speaking as a SalesForce user, there's a lot google could do to help them out.

A) The current SF base technology kinda sucks, and google could make it so SF worked more like the google home page, without real load times, much faster.

B) Google seems to have a much better grasp of web-ergononmics than SF does. There's lots of thing in SF that while they're good ideas, are ultimately unwieldy.

C) A function in SF to automatically search for Corporate info (addresses, #'s, actual contact info and positions...), while in the midst of fleshing out an account, anyone? That would rock.

D) the primary benefit to Google would be revenue (they should charge fairly heavily) and diversification.
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Matt, 21 May 2007 @ 9:27am

Salesforce and a Phone system
What salesforce could use is productivity tools. Integrating an auto dialer that actually works with thier CRM would be very good! I would pay an extra $100 a month for this type of service. Insidesales.com has a great auto dialer that would be great if it could be integrated to Salesforce.com's crm.
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nick, 21 May 2007 @ 10:54am

salesforce and a phone system re
Cisco is developing the hardware adapter to make the auto dialer possible. We are implementing at my company in the next few months once it is released. Google and salesforce would work if google was committed to making the integration quick. Google developes great ideas then sits on them for years in beta versions before they become great products. Probably most peoples biggest gripe, and definately mine.
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Wyatt, 21 May 2007 @ 11:50am

Hmm..
If they released sooner you would gripe about the errors you are getting because it was under tested, hmmmmm.. Google has learned a good lesson in not being anything like M$ (Microsoft). I'm glad they value quality.
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Anonymous Coward, 21 May 2007 @ 7:09pm

Next buyout...
In consulting my Magic 8 ball, I've recieved "Outlook good" when I asked if MS will change their name to Saprosoft.

Any guesses on who MS is going to buy now to react to this purchase?
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Dan L., 21 May 2007 @ 8:50pm

SF and mail merge
If SF merges with Google and 'silos' with Google apps that would be a bad thing for SF. Sure SF and Google both have lots of user community activity but there are some things that the company should provide the customers.

Our company is a heavy user of mail merging from SF to MS Office 2003 using the SF plug in. It works pretty well and is a great productivity tool for standard proposals and contracts.

We were astounded to find out in March (but still true as I write this) SF hasn't made a plug in compatible with Office 2007 yet!
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Logan, 22 May 2007 @ 8:25am

forget salesforce.com
they should buy SugarCRM, it is just as good as the salesforce.com product and its open source!
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Tom Greenberg, 22 May 2007 @ 3:19pm

Google will buy out CRM vendors
It is more than likely Google will buy sfdc out in my opinion. The last thing Google would do is buy an open source CRM to bundel it with thier apps! Google might be looking at purchasing other crm vendors : Netsuite, rightnow, salesboom.com? Who knows.
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edbong, 25 May 2007 @ 10:29am

Google will buy....
Salesforce.com has much more then a technology... it has a sale force to sell to the enterprise market. No doubt to me... Google will sooner or later buy salesforce.com...... ask yourself... as a shareholder of both companies... would you agree? I would.
Appexchange with Google Apps makes absolute sense from the user perspective as well. We just did something similar but open source... http://www.applicationexchange.com
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Robb, 4 Oct 2007 @ 8:05pm

Re: Salesforce and a Phone system
I work with InsideSales.com. We are announcing a full SalesForce.com integration in Oct 2007.
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SJR, 19 Feb 2008 @ 6:55am

Re: salesforce and a phone system re
Nick,

I'd be highly interested in hearing how the implementation of the Cisco autodiale has gone. Our company could use this type of automation.

If you could provide any info I'd appreciate it.
Thanks
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