GOOG to SFRD: Push Them Back, Push Them Back, Way Back!
April 14, 2008
One of the worst kept secrets is that Salesforce is supporting Google’s various enterprise applications. Newsfactor’s discussion “Google Gearing Up for the Enterprise” is a good place to start reading about this blog-tacular event.
The tie up is not new; it is an extension of Google’s cheer leading for Salesforce.com’s approach to the enterprise. Salesforce.com’s marketing angle pivots on a solid anti-Microsoft block of rhetoric. Google is more indirect, even gentler about Microsoft’s dominance. Furthermore, Google has been talking with Salesforce.com for years, and the most recent “development” is an extension of that relationship. Keep in mind that Google is not acquiring Salesforce.com, at least not yet.
Salesforce.com needs a way to work around some of its architectural issues. Like Amazon, there’s razzle-dazzle needed to deliver cloud-based services. Salesforce.com’s multi-tenancy inventions provide some punch that other companies don’t–as yet–have.
The Google Apps allow Salesforce.com to crank its anti-Microsoft marketing engine, and–perhaps more significantly–allows Google to [a] get more information about the traction its products and services have in the enterprise, [b] learn more about the upside and downside of Salesforce.com as a revenue generator, and [c] observe Microsoft’s reaction. How much does this cost Google? Based on the information available to me, the deal costs Google little, and it delivers a significant “intelligence” upside. Microsoft has shown a strong knee-jerk reaction to Google’s activities, and this deal may be another way to agitate Microsoft’s senior executives.
The big question is, “If this Salesforce.com relationship starts to put wood behind Google’s enterprise efforts, will Google buy Salesforce.com?” On the surface, there are some easy benefits to both Google and Salesforce.com. But there are some significant downsides as well; namely, the somewhat fragile nature of the Salesforce.com “plumbing” that a tradtional relational database at its core. I’ve been told that Salesforce.com jumped on the Oracle database when it opened for business. That database has been good and bad. The good is that it can be reliable. The bad is that Salesforce.com has had to do many clever things to avoid choking that database with transactions the Salesforce.com multi-tenant approach; that is, many customers with separate, “virtual” databases. Salesforce.com’s engineers have figured out how to deliver near-real time updates without bringing down the multi-tenant database platform.
Maybe Google will learn enough from this deal, stop cheerleading Salesforce.com from the sidelines, and buy the entire team? Salesforce.com would benefit from more substantive Google engineering. To date, that’s a sideline Google has not chosen to step over.
Stephen Arnold, April 14, 2008
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