Google and Salesforce have in recent months aligned their product strategies more and more closely, leading to rumours of a Salesforce buyout by Google.Salesforce, a leading business services vendor, offers Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications to allow customers to manage and share all of their marketing, sales, support and partner information on-demand.
As bigmouthmedia reported a year ago, the partnership between the two companies caught headlines when Salesforce integrated Google Adwords tracking into their platform. This was further expanded two months ago when the companies announced complete integration of Google Applications, including Documents, Gmail, Calendar and GTalk into Salesforce's online enterprise applications.
This recent announcement effectively made Google Salesforce's productivity suite. Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations can be created from within Salesforce's CRM application - for example, GTalk works as the de facto instant messenger within Salesforce, while sales staff using Gmail can send any email correspondence with potential or existing customers to Salesforce, where it becomes recorded as part of the sales cycle.
Despite rumours of a buy-out of Salesforce by Google, some analysts are sceptical about the prospect. A
recent report by The 451 Group points out that a complete take-over would be very expensive - Salesforce currently has a market value of about $8.5 billion, and by offering its shareholders a 23 percent premium to seal the deal, it would cost Google a hefty $10.5 to buy the CRM-vendor outright. "Although that seems rich, we would note that it's only $1.5 billion more than the amount Oracle was rumoured to be considering paying for Salesforce.com last year," the report said.
Nonetheless, the two companies are showing no signs of slowing down their product integration and are planning a significant announcement by Salesforce's CEO Marc Benioff and Google VP Engineering Vic Gundotra at Salesforce's upcoming Tour de Force developer event on June 23 in Santa Clara, California.
As for what is to be announced, some news sources like TechCrunch point out that Gundotra, who keynoted the recent Google I/O conference, is responsible for developer evangelism and open source programs at Google, including Android, Gears and Open Social, meaning Salesforce integration with one or all three of these is a possibility.
