Google Frienemy's SalesForce & Microsoft

Google has befriended Salesforce.com and recruited the company to battle Microsoft. Salesforce’s customer relationship management software and Google’s suite of office productivity applications, which includes e-mail, word processing and spreadsheets programs will be integrated into a single software package that will be offered over the web.

The offering competes with Microsoft’s customer relationship management software, which is integrated with the its Office suite. Google is seeking to displace Microsoft by offering a web based alternative.

Dave Girouard, Google’s Vice President said the product would have new features like letting users keep track of e-mail sent to a customer right on that customer’s sales record, and a group of people collaborating on a sales account would be able to communicate by instant message with one another".

“In the history of hosted software to date, applications could be like islands,” Mr. Girouard said. “They don’t really work together seamlessly. This is a first of its kind.”

“Salesforce has belatedly recognized that it is important to link C.R.M. apps to productivity tools,” said Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft’s C.R.M. unit. “It has been core to our product since we launched five years ago. It validates our strategy.”

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so that makes Google my best friend,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com. However, Google has introduced a service called Google Market Solutions that competes directly with Salesforce's App Exchange. Also see Google Is Frienemy.

Google After SalesForce With Marketplace

Google just announced the creation of an online marketplace for Google-related solutions released by 3rd parties. The site named "Google Solutions Marketplace" will organize 3rd party solutions built by using Google components. The aim of the site is to simplify match-making between the customers, products and professional services.

The Marketplace's initial focus is to connect customers of communications and collaboration products like Google Apps and Enterprise search with 3rd parties that sell complementary products and services.

For users, the Marketplace has search, browse, and end-user ratings to make it easy to locate and purchase from a vendor that meets their needs. For developers and partners, the Marketplace makes it easy to create information-rich vendor and product listings to reach new customers and grow sales. And listing is self-service and free.

The service is similar to SalesForce.com's App Exchange. Earlier this week Google unveiled Google App Engine with is a service similar to Amazon S3.

Google Rolls Out Cloud Computing Platform

Google gave the cloud computing initiative a major boost today by launching Google App Engine. Web developers can build and run their web applications on the Google infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.

The service is similar to Amazon Simple DB and SalesForce App Exchange where developers can online demand applications or SaaS applications. Google App Engine gives developers access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data.

The development environment includes the following features:

• Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
• Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
• Automatic scaling and load balancing
• Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
• Fully featured local development environment

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving developers more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.

The Future of Online Platforms

It was another jam packed event at the Googleplex, with tonnes of great food, great companies and fantastic panel on "The Future of Online Platforms". Before the speakers talked about the future, Ismail Ghalini, focused on the definition of the platform. Twenty years ago, we all understood what a platform is. It's essentially an OS, and you had three options: MS-DOS if you want the large market, Mac OS if you're edgy, and UNIX if you're really technical. They all did pretty much the same thing, had fairly similar business models, and people built applications that could be ported from one to the other (somehow). What is a platform today? What is it made of? How do you use to build not only applications but real businesses on top of it? What are thebusiness models? Can I build for multiple of them at the same time? What do the ecosystems look like? Who do I talk to in order to getstarted? That kind of thing. Does it make sense? It was a controversial and fun event and we will have to video soon for all to view.