Friday, CNN Money pre-announced the announcement of what looks to be a pretty deep business cooperation between Google and Salesforce.com.
It makes a lot of sense.
In the battle against Microsoft (google and Marc Beniof are set off squarely against MSFT) there are number of points of strong synergy between the two companies.
Right now, Google Applications is mail, calendering, Web site and spreadsheet - but Salesforce.com and the Appexchange are well-designed, well-implemented systems of business application software as a service.Clearly, not only the CRM applications, but the Apex API and and Appexchange applications can add a lot of value to Google Applications.
Having said that, nothing is holding back the developer community from releasing mashups and integration with various Google applications and Google Labs projects. I would guess that Google likes the salesforce.com presence in the enterprise and the telemarketing, support and sales team that SF.com runs.
On one hand, it's great to see Google and Salesforce.com working together to compete with the largest software company in the world - but a merger might create some pushback in the user community. I am not sure that every salesforce.com customer would be happy about the biggest search company in the world being able to poke a finger in their customer information.
From an application security perspective, putting a lot of Web 2.0 business applications in one place is not necessarily a good idea. Large targets tend to increase the motivation for attackers and increase the complexity of security countermeasures and amount of ongoing vulnerability assessment.
Even today, without a Google-Salesforce.com merger,I think there are issues with Salesforce having so much sensitive customer data. Just one published data security breach would be enough to rock their revenue boat pretty seriously.
Then again, Salesforce.com is on a roll and maybe customers lists from SME customers are not that sensitive.
