It was over a year and a half ago when I had a chance to listen to Marc Benioff talk about how his company's software would be integrating with Google to provide a mashup designed to allow companies to better track their Google advertising. Using the services together, organizations would be able to utilize the CRM portion of the software to track where customers came from: which ad, which keyword, which landing page, etc. The matter was so important, I made the article a High Priority! column in the September 2006 issue of [Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine].
The two companies have decided to take the collaboration one step further and, as a result, you will now be able to purchase Google Applications via Salesforce.com, and there will be tighter integration between the two companies. For example, e-mails sent to customers via Google's mail application will be connected to customer records in Salesforce.com.
While this collaboration is great, there are still companies that worry about how to maintain security when their vital corporate data is stored on the servers of another company.
Perhaps this move will manage to make customers more comfortable with the hosted approach, as Google has a strong reputation and helps boost Salesforce.com's credibility -- not that the company really needed it, but having such a large partner would help anyone.
In my opinion, there are many companies that don't want to worry about having idle employees if their broadband provider or router fails.
I have to say that I really appreciate Marc Benioff as a spokesperson for Salesforce.com because he calls them as he sees them. No longer having Tom Siebel to go after, Benioff has resorted to blasting Microsoft. If you want a more specific example of what I mean, consider the memo put out by Benioff in November of 2005...

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