Google and Salesforce join forces
Filed under: business, technology
Google and Salesforce announced a partnership the other day that will bring a combined Google/Salesforce business suite to it’s users. The service is called “Salesforce for Google Apps” and touts “powerful yet easy-to-use productivity tools for smarter management of customers, sales and marketing.”
There is the obviously emphasis on collaboration and communication between team/project members. My ’sales’ experience is relatively limited - I managed a newspaper in college and filling in for the occasional employee is about the extent of it - but the functionality seems practical.
One key feature I liked is the fact that email being sent (from the Gmail interface) can automatically be sent to a customers CRM account. This provides you with a worry-free audit trail and allows your boss or someone covering for you (if you’re out sick or something) to quickly pick up where you left off. Likewise, you can send customer emails directly within Salesforce. I also liked the fact that you can attach/create Google Docs directly from Salesforce. The uses for this are obvious and I think it will really be able to help the sales process. Everything from quote notes, sales presentations and final contracts can be created directly from the Salesforce interface.
It didn’t look like the interface was the same between the two systems which is disappointing but I haven’t signed up for a test account yet so that’s just speculation based on the tour. I think that offering a consistent interface between Google and Salesforce is a must and could help adoption among small businesses.
I don’t know much about Salesforce’s push for mobile but Google has mobile versions of Gmail and Docs and continues to improve them. I’m curious to see what kind of mobile sales/business applications they make available to their users. Anything less than full functionality is unacceptable, but that would be a pretty major project. I’d also like to get some information on what the security architecture looks like. ZOHO just announced an enhanced architecture as part of it’s enterprise CRM which is a little more inline with what I see as an SAP consultant.
Simply put, the decision makes sense - Google is trying to break into enterprise business, Salesforce has a great customer base (and from what I read a decent set of applications) and both are competing with Microsoft in some fashion. The partnership allows them to put the full-court press on Microsoft who has been slow to adopt a web-based business model.
It will obviously take time for larger corporations to make the move given the obvious security concerns (mostly on the Google front) and the fact that the majority of business users are still not comfortable with online applications. One thing that could help Google’s case for enterprise applications is the fact that Vista has had so many bumps along the way. The rate at which corporations have been moving to Vista has been slow at best. I work for a technology company and we haven’t even heard rumor’s of a potential migration.
Here’s a quick video tour of Salesforce for Google Apps:
Posted on April 17th, 2008 by Nathan
1 Comment
April 17th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Nathan, Thank you for the wonderful detailed reply, to my linkedin Q. I was thinking on your lines actually. If I were to spend gazillion amounts of money, I would go for a product that has it all. Obviously Salesforce(SF) lacks some functionality for it to go tie-up mode.
My take: Gmail is not all that cool etc. amongst the email packages out there. I rate yahoo the best with an even cooler API set. In google talk , u cant ever go invisible, which is a necessary feature if u want any kind of work done. But its APIs are good. I could install gtalk on my blackberry with ease.
But my feeling, a CRM should have built-in collab tools no? Is SF a CRM at all?
That means that we are now looking at mass market marriages. Google seems to be taking up its push technology feature a notch higher, which I can understand. But SF?
And like you mentioned, even the super mass, Vista zone is where customers are at. Where is the security? Or do we care at all.
I am not into CRM at all, but this news caught my curiosity and Im trying to understand the world(oops software world) domination approach that google is looking at by trying to understand its tie-up culture