San Francisco – Google and Salesforce.com, two of the tech companies that are mounting serious challenges to Microsoft, may team up to take on the software giant with their combined strength. Through both words and actions, executives from Salesforce.com and Google have made clear they hold each other in high esteem. An anonymous source familiar with the deal said a new pact is expected to be announced in the next few weeks.
Aiming at Microsoft
The larger aim of the partnership, though, would likely be ratcheting up competition against the two companies’ common enemy: Microsoft.
Redmond has taken direct aim at Salesforce.com’s bread and butter with its online CRM offering.
Google, now that it has admitted to move onto the desktop, is taking on a formidable opponent in Microsoft. Although details are still being negotiated, the alliance would most likely involve blending Google’s web-based mass-market applications like Gmail and instant messaging, spreadsheets and word processing with Salesforce.com’s business management programs for managing customer relationships (CRM), according to The WSJ.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, competes in all those fields, making it logical for Mountain View-based Google and San Francisco-based Salesforce.com to draw upon their respective strengths to thwart a common rival.
Both companies are known for their innovative, forward-looking business strategies. A marriage between the two is bound to yield a genius child, conventional wisdom would suggest.
Certainly, they have complementary product strategies and similar styles in management and the way they support innovation, said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of Nucleus Research.
She also pointed to one announcement coming out of Salesforce.com’s Developer Conference, which kicked off Monday. Called “Salesforce SOA,” it enables service-oriented architectures to run as a service on Salesforce.com. Users can thus build SOA-based business processes.
Recently, Google has been promoting its applications more aggressively as it endeavors to give web surfers more reasons to visit its site, where it makes most of its money from online ads. To underscore its ambitions, Google earlier this month embraced “Search, Ads and Apps” as its new theme.
Indeed, the synergies are so intriguing that speculation is growing over the possibility that the partnership agreement may be a prelude to an acquisition. Indeed, many acquisitions begin as partnerships — and this is not the first time such rumors have come up.
In an interview, Salesforce.com Chairman Marc Benioff reiterated his long-standing admiration of Google but declined to comment on any possible talks. “The enemy of the enemy is my friend,” he said. “That makes Google my best friend.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment.
Founded near the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, Salesforce.com now boasts 32,300 customers and is expected to generate more than $700 million in revenue this year.