Salesforce.com and Google have joined forces to bring to market a new suite of solutions that will give companies the freedome to run their businesses “in the cloud”, forgoing the cost and complexity of managing hardware or software infrastructure.
Salesforce for Google Apps, as the product is called, is the combination of the Google Apps suite of productivity applications and the Salesforce suite of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications that will enable businesses to communicate and collaborate without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain.
"Google and salesforce.com have always had similar models and philosophies about delivering innovations made possible by the Internet," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
"Salesforce.com is thrilled to be offering Google Apps integrated with our Salesforce applications and Force.com Platform-as-a-Service to the millions of businesses looking to manage their entire office in the cloud," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com.
This is the second collaboration for both the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider and the Internet goliath. In June 2007, they came together to launch Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords, which has today become a valuable tool for thousands of businesses by encapsulating every element of the customer life-cycle - advertising, lead generation, sales, and customer support - in one solution.
"Salesforce.com was a pioneer in Software-as-a-Service and a year ago we joined them in this mission to bring the benefits of cloud computing to businesses of all types. 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," said Schmidt.
Salesforce for Google Apps is a combination of essential applications for business productivity such as email, calendaring, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, instant messaging and CRM services such as sales, marketing, service and support, partners.
According to Salesforce.com this solution will enable an entirely new way for business professionals to communicate, collaborate, and work together in real time over the Web.
"The combination of our leading CRM applications and Google's business productivity applications pushes forward the transformation of the industry to cloud computing. The end of software is here," said Benioff.
Analysts say that Salesforce for Google Apps is set to completely revolutionize the way people work and is the best example of consumerization of the enterprise.
Salesforce for Google Apps is available today to all salesforce.com customers at no additional charge.
Salesforce.com also will be offering Salesforce for Google Apps Supported, a package that includes integrated telephone end user support, unified billing and provisioning, enhanced platform APIs, additional third party applications, and advanced Google Apps functionality, all for 10 dollars per user, per month. This package is currently scheduled to be available in Summer 2008. |
