Salesforce is teaming up with Google on several fronts, integrating Salesforce data into Google’s G Suite business productivity software and using Google Cloud as it expands internationally, Salesforce announced Monday.
Diane Greene, leader of Google’s cloud computing strategy, joined Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on stage Monday afternoon at Dreamforce in San Francisco to discuss the new partnership, Salesforce said in a press release. The deal includes a provision that will allow Salesforce customers that currently don’t use G Suite to use it for free for a year, the companies said.
“Today we’re bringing all the power of Salesforce and all the power of Google together for the very first time,” Benioff said, introducing Green and Sridhar Ramaswamy, senior vice president of ads and commerce at Google.
Under the partnership, Salesforce customers will be able to share data between their Salesforce consoles and G Suite, which could be quite helpful for heavy users of both products. Salesforce Lightning and Quip, an document-management suite acquired by Salesforce last year, will work more closely together with Gmail, Hangouts Meet, Google Calendar, Drive, Docs and Sheets, and there will also be tighter integration between Salesforce and Google Analytics.
Salesforce also plans to use Google Cloud “for its core services as part of the company’s international infrastructure expansion,” it said in the release. Google Cloud is now “a preferred cloud provider” for Salesforce, which calls into question the meaning of the word given that Salesforce called Amazon Web Services its “preferred public cloud infrastructure partner” last year, also with plans to use AWS for international expansion.
Microsoft and Salesforce struck a similar partnership in 2014 around Microsoft Office, but Azure has yet to become the third “preferred” cloud vendor in Salesforce’s world. Salesforce built its own data centers as one of the first software-as-a-service vendors to gain significant traction, but it makes sense that a company that likes to think of itself as a cloud pioneer would take advantage of the benefits of public cloud infrastructure while playing cloud vendors against each other for pricing deals.
Some of the Salesforce-Google integrations are already available, and the ones that aren’t will start rolling out early next year. There will be an additional cost for some of the features, and some restrictions apply to the free year of G Suite service.
Editor’s Note: Salesforce is a GeekWire sponsor. This post was updated with a quote from the Dreamforce opening keynote.
